Tuesday, 23 December 2008
Sunday, 21 December 2008
Deep Throat
Deep Throat's Big Impact
by Jonathan Freedland
In the United States, the film of the festive season is It's a Wonderful Life - the Frank Capra classic in which a beleaguered James Stewart, contemplating suicide, is visited by an angel who shows him the world as it would have been had Stewart's character never lived. The movie runs on almost every American network at Christmas time, as much part of the late December folklore as Scrooge or Jingle Bells.
So it's tempting to run the same exercise with Mark Felt, the former number three at the FBI who revealed just three years ago that he was the legendary Deep Throat of the Watergate drama, and who died yesterday aged 95.
For the world would have been very different had Felt never lived. Watergate might not have entered the language, with "-gate" thereafter the standard suffix for every conceivable scandal in the US and beyond.
Without Felt's anonymous confirmation of the information Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had picked up from other sources, the Washington Post might never have been able to reveal that the 1972 break-in at the Democratic party's headquarters - in the Watergate building - was in fact part of "a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage" directed by the Richard Nixon White House.
Without Felt, Americans might never have realised that sometimes conspiracies are not just theories - that sometimes they exist and go to the highest level. They might not have seen that their government was capable of lying to them, that their president - whose office has near-sacred status in the United States - was quite ready to abuse his power, to trample on the constitution and to have his aides engage in the most sordid of crimes, from breaking and entering to money laundering. It was thanks to Felt that America finally reasserted, with Nixon's forced resignation, that no one - not even the president - is above the law. (This might be a point that has to be reasserted once again, given George W Bush's own treading on the US constitution in the course of fighting his "war on terror.")
There are other debts, too. After Watergate, the press acquired a new status in American life. Sure, it was good for journalistic egos to see two reporters lionised - with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein in the outstanding movie All the President's Men - but there was more to it than that. Watergate and the manner of its revelation taught a generation of Americans, and others, that journalistic digging is not only about intrusion and selling papers. Sometimes it is the last check on unchecked power - and an essential requirement of a free society.
The same goes for whistleblowers. If anyone anywhere - whether inside a company or a government department - sees a serious violation of either the law or of high principle committed under their nose, they can invoke the shade of Felt as their witness. He saw Nixon's determination to shut down the FBI's investigation of the Watergate break-in as obstruction of justice - and he blew the whistle.
Which is not to say that Felt should be remembered as a saint with a pristine conscience. For one thing his motivation may, in part, have been no loftier than that of most Washington leakers: turf wars and office politics. Furious at having been passed over for the top job at the FBI, he further resented Nixon's deploying a rival agency - the CIA - to block the bureau.
Moreover, Felt was hardly a purist on matters of constitutional probity. Incredibly, just as he was crying foul over Nixon's methods to Woodward, Felt was ordering some illegal break-ins of his own, busting into the homes of friends and relatives of activists involved in the leftist Weather Underground. As the New York Times reports today, "The people he chose as targets had committed no crimes. The FBI had no search warrants."
Despite Felt's claims that he had ordered the break-ins in the name of national security, he was convicted in 1980 of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. In a neat twist, among those who testified on his behalf was one Richard M Nixon.
It remains a terrific story. The best details in All the President's Men - with Woodward sending Felt coded messages by moving a flowerpot outside his apartment - are all true. It may not have been a wholly wonderful life but Felt helped topple a corrupt and criminal president - and that's a pretty wonderful achievement.
© 2008 Guardian News and Media Limited
by Jonathan Freedland
In the United States, the film of the festive season is It's a Wonderful Life - the Frank Capra classic in which a beleaguered James Stewart, contemplating suicide, is visited by an angel who shows him the world as it would have been had Stewart's character never lived. The movie runs on almost every American network at Christmas time, as much part of the late December folklore as Scrooge or Jingle Bells.
So it's tempting to run the same exercise with Mark Felt, the former number three at the FBI who revealed just three years ago that he was the legendary Deep Throat of the Watergate drama, and who died yesterday aged 95.
For the world would have been very different had Felt never lived. Watergate might not have entered the language, with "-gate" thereafter the standard suffix for every conceivable scandal in the US and beyond.
Without Felt's anonymous confirmation of the information Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had picked up from other sources, the Washington Post might never have been able to reveal that the 1972 break-in at the Democratic party's headquarters - in the Watergate building - was in fact part of "a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage" directed by the Richard Nixon White House.
Without Felt, Americans might never have realised that sometimes conspiracies are not just theories - that sometimes they exist and go to the highest level. They might not have seen that their government was capable of lying to them, that their president - whose office has near-sacred status in the United States - was quite ready to abuse his power, to trample on the constitution and to have his aides engage in the most sordid of crimes, from breaking and entering to money laundering. It was thanks to Felt that America finally reasserted, with Nixon's forced resignation, that no one - not even the president - is above the law. (This might be a point that has to be reasserted once again, given George W Bush's own treading on the US constitution in the course of fighting his "war on terror.")
There are other debts, too. After Watergate, the press acquired a new status in American life. Sure, it was good for journalistic egos to see two reporters lionised - with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodward and Bernstein in the outstanding movie All the President's Men - but there was more to it than that. Watergate and the manner of its revelation taught a generation of Americans, and others, that journalistic digging is not only about intrusion and selling papers. Sometimes it is the last check on unchecked power - and an essential requirement of a free society.
The same goes for whistleblowers. If anyone anywhere - whether inside a company or a government department - sees a serious violation of either the law or of high principle committed under their nose, they can invoke the shade of Felt as their witness. He saw Nixon's determination to shut down the FBI's investigation of the Watergate break-in as obstruction of justice - and he blew the whistle.
Which is not to say that Felt should be remembered as a saint with a pristine conscience. For one thing his motivation may, in part, have been no loftier than that of most Washington leakers: turf wars and office politics. Furious at having been passed over for the top job at the FBI, he further resented Nixon's deploying a rival agency - the CIA - to block the bureau.
Moreover, Felt was hardly a purist on matters of constitutional probity. Incredibly, just as he was crying foul over Nixon's methods to Woodward, Felt was ordering some illegal break-ins of his own, busting into the homes of friends and relatives of activists involved in the leftist Weather Underground. As the New York Times reports today, "The people he chose as targets had committed no crimes. The FBI had no search warrants."
Despite Felt's claims that he had ordered the break-ins in the name of national security, he was convicted in 1980 of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of Americans. In a neat twist, among those who testified on his behalf was one Richard M Nixon.
It remains a terrific story. The best details in All the President's Men - with Woodward sending Felt coded messages by moving a flowerpot outside his apartment - are all true. It may not have been a wholly wonderful life but Felt helped topple a corrupt and criminal president - and that's a pretty wonderful achievement.
© 2008 Guardian News and Media Limited
Saturday, 20 December 2008
Monday, 15 December 2008
Friday, 14 November 2008
Thursday, 13 November 2008
John Pilger on Obama
My first visit to Texas was in 1968, on the fifth anniversary of the assassination of President John F Kennedy in Dallas. I drove south, following the line of telegraph poles to the small town of Midlothian, where I met Penn Jones Jr, editor of the Midlothian Mirror. Save for his drawl and fine boots, everything about Penn was the antithesis of the Texas stereotype. Having exposed the racists of the John Birch Society, his printing press had been repeatedly firebombed. Week after week, he painstakingly assembled evidence that all but demolished the official version of Kennedy's murder.
This was journalism as it had been before corporate journalism was invented, before the first schools of journalism were set up and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around those whose "professionalism" and "objectivity" carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth. Journalists such as Penn Jones, independent of vested power, indefatigable and principled, often reflect ordinary American attitudes, which have seldom conformed to the stereotypes promoted by the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic.
Read American Dreams: Lost and Found by the masterly Studs Terkel, who died on 31 October, or scan the surveys that unerringly attribute enlightened views to a majority who believe that "government should care for those who cannot care for themselves" and are prepared to pay higher taxes for universal health care, who support nuclear disarmament and want their troops out of other people's countries.
Returning to Texas, I am struck again by those so unlike the redneck stereotype, in spite of the burden of a form of brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood, in maintaining that superiority.
That is the subtext of Barack Obama's "oratory". He says he wants to build up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to Obama's election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed for news reporting since 4 November (eg, "liberal Americans smiled and the world smiled with them"), but for the same reasons that millions of angry emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the "bailout" of Wall Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war.
Two years ago, this anti-war vote installed a Democratic majority in Congress, only to watch the Democrats hand over more money to George W Bush to continue his blood-fest. For his part, the "anti-war" Obama voted to give Bush what he wanted. Yes, Obama's election is historic, a symbol of great change to many. But it is equally true that the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class. The courageous Martin Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by a "liberal" Democratic administration. And he was shot. In striking contrast, a young black major serving in Vietnam, Colin Powell, was used to "investigate" and whitewash the infamous My Lai massacre. As Bush's secretary of state, Powell was often described as a "liberal" and was considered ideal to lie to the United Nations about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Condaleezza Rice, lauded as a successful black woman, has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice.
Obama's first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted. The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent "neoliberal" devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an "Israel-first" Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians - an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people's loathing of the US and the spawning of jihadism.
No serious scrutiny of this is permitted within the histrionics of Obama mania, just as no serious scrutiny of the betrayal of the majority of black South Africans was permitted within the "Mandela moment". This is especially marked in Britain, where America's divine right to "lead" is important to elite British interests. The Observer, which supported Bush's war in Iraq, echoing his fabricated evidence, now announces, without evidence, that "America has restored the world's faith in its ideals". These "ideals", which Obama will swear to uphold, have overseen, since 1945, the destruction of 50 governments, including democracies, and 30 popular liberation movements, causing the deaths of countless men, women and children.
None of this was uttered during the election campaign. Had that been allowed, there might even have been recognition that liberalism as a narrow, supremely arrogant, war-making ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Prior to Blair's criminal warmaking, ideology was denied by him and his media mystics. "Blair can be a beacon to the world," declared the Guardian in 1997. "[He is] turning leadership into an art form."
Today, merely insert "Obama". As for historic moments, there is another that has gone unreported but is well under way - liberal democracy's shift towards a corporate dictatorship, managed by people regardless of ethnicity, with the media as its clichéd façade. "True democracy," wrote Penn Jones Jr, the Texas truth-teller, "is constant vigilance: not thinking the way you're meant to think, and keeping your eyes wide open at all times."
This was journalism as it had been before corporate journalism was invented, before the first schools of journalism were set up and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around those whose "professionalism" and "objectivity" carried an unspoken obligation to ensure that news and opinion were in tune with an establishment consensus, regardless of the truth. Journalists such as Penn Jones, independent of vested power, indefatigable and principled, often reflect ordinary American attitudes, which have seldom conformed to the stereotypes promoted by the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic.
Read American Dreams: Lost and Found by the masterly Studs Terkel, who died on 31 October, or scan the surveys that unerringly attribute enlightened views to a majority who believe that "government should care for those who cannot care for themselves" and are prepared to pay higher taxes for universal health care, who support nuclear disarmament and want their troops out of other people's countries.
Returning to Texas, I am struck again by those so unlike the redneck stereotype, in spite of the burden of a form of brainwashing placed on most Americans from a tender age: that theirs is the most superior society in the world, and all means are justified, including the spilling of copious blood, in maintaining that superiority.
That is the subtext of Barack Obama's "oratory". He says he wants to build up US military power; and he threatens to ignite a new war in Pakistan, killing yet more brown-skinned people. That will bring tears, too. Unlike those on election night, these other tears will be unseen in Chicago and London. This is not to doubt the sincerity of much of the response to Obama's election, which happened not because of the unction that has passed for news reporting since 4 November (eg, "liberal Americans smiled and the world smiled with them"), but for the same reasons that millions of angry emails were sent to the White House and Congress when the "bailout" of Wall Street was revealed, and because most Americans are fed up with war.
Two years ago, this anti-war vote installed a Democratic majority in Congress, only to watch the Democrats hand over more money to George W Bush to continue his blood-fest. For his part, the "anti-war" Obama voted to give Bush what he wanted. Yes, Obama's election is historic, a symbol of great change to many. But it is equally true that the American elite has grown adept at using the black middle and management class. The courageous Martin Luther King recognised this when he linked the human rights of black Americans with the human rights of the Vietnamese, then being slaughtered by a "liberal" Democratic administration. And he was shot. In striking contrast, a young black major serving in Vietnam, Colin Powell, was used to "investigate" and whitewash the infamous My Lai massacre. As Bush's secretary of state, Powell was often described as a "liberal" and was considered ideal to lie to the United Nations about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Condaleezza Rice, lauded as a successful black woman, has worked assiduously to deny the Palestinians justice.
Obama's first two crucial appointments represent a denial of the wishes of his supporters on the principal issues on which they voted. The vice-president-elect, Joe Biden, is a proud warmaker and Zionist. Rahm Emanuel, who is to be the all-important White House chief of staff, is a fervent "neoliberal" devoted to the doctrine that led to the present economic collapse and impoverishment of millions. He is also an "Israel-first" Zionist who served in the Israeli army and opposes meaningful justice for the Palestinians - an injustice that is at the root of Muslim people's loathing of the US and the spawning of jihadism.
No serious scrutiny of this is permitted within the histrionics of Obama mania, just as no serious scrutiny of the betrayal of the majority of black South Africans was permitted within the "Mandela moment". This is especially marked in Britain, where America's divine right to "lead" is important to elite British interests. The Observer, which supported Bush's war in Iraq, echoing his fabricated evidence, now announces, without evidence, that "America has restored the world's faith in its ideals". These "ideals", which Obama will swear to uphold, have overseen, since 1945, the destruction of 50 governments, including democracies, and 30 popular liberation movements, causing the deaths of countless men, women and children.
None of this was uttered during the election campaign. Had that been allowed, there might even have been recognition that liberalism as a narrow, supremely arrogant, war-making ideology is destroying liberalism as a reality. Prior to Blair's criminal warmaking, ideology was denied by him and his media mystics. "Blair can be a beacon to the world," declared the Guardian in 1997. "[He is] turning leadership into an art form."
Today, merely insert "Obama". As for historic moments, there is another that has gone unreported but is well under way - liberal democracy's shift towards a corporate dictatorship, managed by people regardless of ethnicity, with the media as its clichéd façade. "True democracy," wrote Penn Jones Jr, the Texas truth-teller, "is constant vigilance: not thinking the way you're meant to think, and keeping your eyes wide open at all times."
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
Tuesday, 11 November 2008
Guantanamo
Shut Guantanamo on Day One, Obama Urged
by Jane Sutton
MIAMI - Five human rights groups urged European governments on Monday to accept Guantanamo prisoners who cannot be sent home for fear of persecution, while a sixth group called on U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to sign an order shutting the prison camp on the day he takes office.
The global efforts are aimed at pressuring Obama to make good on his campaign pledge to close the widely reviled Guantanamo detention camp and halt the special tribunals that try foreign terrorism suspects outside the regular courts.
"President-elect Obama, with a stroke of your presidential pen, on Day One of your administration, you can ensure that our government will be faithful to the Constitution and to the principles upon which America was founded," the American Civil Liberties Union said in a full-page ad in the New York Times.
"Give us back the America we believe in," the ACLU urged Obama, who takes office on Jan. 20.
The detention camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is widely viewed as a stain on America's human rights record. It has held more than 750 captives from around the world since opening in 2002, including many who were caught up in sweeps or sold for bounties during U.S. efforts to route al Qaeda and associated groups after the hijacked plane attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
About 255 men are still held at Guantanamo, including 50 the United States has cleared for release but cannot repatriate for fear they will be tortured or persecuted in their home countries.
In Berlin, five international rights groups issued a joint call to European governments to help close Guantanamo by granting humanitarian resettlement and protection to those 50 captives, who are from nations that include China, Libya, Russia, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan.
"This would have a double effect: helping to end the ordeal of an individual unlawfully held in violation of his human rights, and helping end the international human rights scandal that is Guantanamo," said Daniel Gorevan, who manages Amnesty International's "Counter Terror with Justice" campaign.
Guantanamo Quagmire
Joining Amnesty in the statement were the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, Reprieve and the International Federation for Human Rights. The groups issued the joint statement after a closed two-day meeting in Berlin.
"This is a key opportunity for both sides of the Atlantic to move beyond the misguided acts of the war on terror: rendition, secret detention, and torture," said Cori Crider, staff attorney at Reprieve, a British group that advocates for prisoners' rights.
The U.S. State Department's legal adviser and other senior officials have been traveling around Europe, North Africa and elsewhere trying to persuade nations to take home their Guantanamo prisoners.
Some governments have denied that the Guantanamo prisoners are in fact their citizens, while others have been reluctant to agree to U.S. requests to imprison or monitor Guantanamo returnees.
The outpouring of international goodwill for Obama's election victory suggests America's first black president may enjoy a diplomatic honeymoon among nations that have been reluctant to help the Bush administration find a way out of the Guantanamo quagmire.
But Obama will also need support at home if he is to shut it down. The United States still wants to try about 80 Guantanamo prisoners on terrorism charges and holds a few dozen others it does not intend to try but considers too dangerous to release.
During his election campaign, Obama said he favored holding those trials in the United States.
Those facing charges include five accused Sept. 11 plotters. But proposals to move any Guantanamo prisoners to the United States -- such as to U.S. military prisons in Kansas and South Carolina -- have been met with resistance among U.S. congressional representatives.
Additional reporting by Sue Pleming and Randall Mikkelsen in Washington
Editing by Eric Beech
© 2008 Reuters
by Jane Sutton
MIAMI - Five human rights groups urged European governments on Monday to accept Guantanamo prisoners who cannot be sent home for fear of persecution, while a sixth group called on U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to sign an order shutting the prison camp on the day he takes office.
The global efforts are aimed at pressuring Obama to make good on his campaign pledge to close the widely reviled Guantanamo detention camp and halt the special tribunals that try foreign terrorism suspects outside the regular courts.
"President-elect Obama, with a stroke of your presidential pen, on Day One of your administration, you can ensure that our government will be faithful to the Constitution and to the principles upon which America was founded," the American Civil Liberties Union said in a full-page ad in the New York Times.
"Give us back the America we believe in," the ACLU urged Obama, who takes office on Jan. 20.
The detention camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is widely viewed as a stain on America's human rights record. It has held more than 750 captives from around the world since opening in 2002, including many who were caught up in sweeps or sold for bounties during U.S. efforts to route al Qaeda and associated groups after the hijacked plane attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
About 255 men are still held at Guantanamo, including 50 the United States has cleared for release but cannot repatriate for fear they will be tortured or persecuted in their home countries.
In Berlin, five international rights groups issued a joint call to European governments to help close Guantanamo by granting humanitarian resettlement and protection to those 50 captives, who are from nations that include China, Libya, Russia, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan.
"This would have a double effect: helping to end the ordeal of an individual unlawfully held in violation of his human rights, and helping end the international human rights scandal that is Guantanamo," said Daniel Gorevan, who manages Amnesty International's "Counter Terror with Justice" campaign.
Guantanamo Quagmire
Joining Amnesty in the statement were the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, Reprieve and the International Federation for Human Rights. The groups issued the joint statement after a closed two-day meeting in Berlin.
"This is a key opportunity for both sides of the Atlantic to move beyond the misguided acts of the war on terror: rendition, secret detention, and torture," said Cori Crider, staff attorney at Reprieve, a British group that advocates for prisoners' rights.
The U.S. State Department's legal adviser and other senior officials have been traveling around Europe, North Africa and elsewhere trying to persuade nations to take home their Guantanamo prisoners.
Some governments have denied that the Guantanamo prisoners are in fact their citizens, while others have been reluctant to agree to U.S. requests to imprison or monitor Guantanamo returnees.
The outpouring of international goodwill for Obama's election victory suggests America's first black president may enjoy a diplomatic honeymoon among nations that have been reluctant to help the Bush administration find a way out of the Guantanamo quagmire.
But Obama will also need support at home if he is to shut it down. The United States still wants to try about 80 Guantanamo prisoners on terrorism charges and holds a few dozen others it does not intend to try but considers too dangerous to release.
During his election campaign, Obama said he favored holding those trials in the United States.
Those facing charges include five accused Sept. 11 plotters. But proposals to move any Guantanamo prisoners to the United States -- such as to U.S. military prisons in Kansas and South Carolina -- have been met with resistance among U.S. congressional representatives.
Additional reporting by Sue Pleming and Randall Mikkelsen in Washington
Editing by Eric Beech
© 2008 Reuters
Friday, 7 November 2008
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Friday, 31 October 2008
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
Monday, 20 October 2008
Sunday, 19 October 2008
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
Cork Jazz Fest Mix
Specially compiled for Stevo's Stag weekend!
http://www.zshare.net/download/20526807d8637e84/
Playlist:
1 Lonnie Liston Smith and the Cosmic Echoes - Expand your mind
2 Sleep Walker feat Bembe Segue - Into the Sun
3 Mark Murphy - Why and how
4 Mulatu - Yekatit
5 Quantic Soul Orchestra - Marrakech
6 Yesterdays New Quintet - Play Car
7 The Five Corners Quintet - Trading Eights
8 Antonio Carlos Jobim - Borzeguim
9 Roland Kirk - Spirits Up above
10 Nina Simone - Gin House Blues
11 Cinematic Orchestra - Channel 1 Suite
12 Earth Bound - I see the sun
13 Bugge Wesseltoft - Change
14 Girma Hadgu - Ene Alatchi Almoren
15 Ronnie Foster - Mystic Brew
16 Chet Baker - Its Always You
17 Miles Davis - So What
18 John Coltrane - Acknowledgement
http://www.zshare.net/download/20526807d8637e84/
Playlist:
1 Lonnie Liston Smith and the Cosmic Echoes - Expand your mind
2 Sleep Walker feat Bembe Segue - Into the Sun
3 Mark Murphy - Why and how
4 Mulatu - Yekatit
5 Quantic Soul Orchestra - Marrakech
6 Yesterdays New Quintet - Play Car
7 The Five Corners Quintet - Trading Eights
8 Antonio Carlos Jobim - Borzeguim
9 Roland Kirk - Spirits Up above
10 Nina Simone - Gin House Blues
11 Cinematic Orchestra - Channel 1 Suite
12 Earth Bound - I see the sun
13 Bugge Wesseltoft - Change
14 Girma Hadgu - Ene Alatchi Almoren
15 Ronnie Foster - Mystic Brew
16 Chet Baker - Its Always You
17 Miles Davis - So What
18 John Coltrane - Acknowledgement
Monday, 13 October 2008
Friday, 3 October 2008
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
Greedy bastards get-out clause
No "Bailout" for The World's Poorest
by Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS - As a spreading financial crisis threatens to deepen the economic recession in the United States, the news of an unprecedented 700-billion-dollar bailout package reverberated through the corridors of the United Nations last week as over 100 world leaders gathered in New York for the annual talk-fest: the 63rd session of the General Assembly.
Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko in the 1987 film "Wall Street." His speech to a meeting of stock traders is still considered a classic on Wall Street: "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works." (File photo)At a time when the United Nations is seeking increased financial assistance from rich nations to help developing countries meet the faltering Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including a 50-percent reduction on extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, the current U.S. economic crisis and its predictably negative fallout overseas is expected to be a major setback.
Addressing delegates last week, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that the current gloomy outlook threatens the well-being of billions of people, "none more so than the poorest of the poor."
"This only compounds the damage [already] being caused by much higher prices for food and fuel", he added.
Ban has called for 72 billion dollars per year in additional external financing to achieve the MDGs by 2015.
As one Asian delegate put it: "The 72 billion is peanuts compared to the 700 billion the White House wants to dish out to save some of the Wall Street firms from going belly up."
"And the urgent needs of developing nations will now be the least of the priorities of the United States and other Western donors," he predicted.
Father Miguel d'Escoto Brockman of Nicaragua, the newly-elected president of the General Assembly, warned that the current financial crisis will have "very serious consequences" that will impede the significant progress, "if indeed any progress is made", towards the targets established by the MDGs, "which are themselves insufficient".
"It is always the poor who pay the price for the unbridled greed and irresponsibility of the powerful," he said, taking a passing shot at the staggering 700-billion-dollar bailout proposed by the administration of President George W. Bush to save the high-stakes investment banks of New York from bankruptcy and collapse.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates that "money doesn't seem to be a problem, when the problem is money".
"Let us look for a moment at what is happening on Wall Street and in financial markets around the world. There, unsound investment threatens the homes and jobs of the middle class," he added.
There is something fundamentally wrong, he argued, "when money seems to be abundant, but funds for investment in people seem so short in supply".
Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding told the General Assembly that the crisis currently rocking the world's financial markets reflects the inadequacy of the regulatory structures that are essential to the effective functioning of any market.
But it is more than that. It represents the failure on the part of the international financial system to facilitate the flow of resources into areas where they can produce real wealth -- not paper wealth, he added.
Golding said the world is not short of capital: "What it lacks are the mechanisms to ensure the efficient utilisation of that capital."
As the economic meltdown in the United States continues, the casualties are piling up both among commercial and investment banks: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual (allowed to collapse with no government bailout); American International Group, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (allowed to survive with emergency financial assistance, including some from the government); Merrill Lynch has been folded into Bank of America and Citigroup has taken over Wachovia Bank.
The outrage against Wall Street, described as the world's financial capital, is also directed at the high salaried chief executive officers and the middle rung bosses who make multi-million-dollar salaries, with stock options and perks that set them up in a privileged class by themselves.
According to one report, the lowest salary on Wall Street was around 280,000 dollars a year in a country where the average low or middle class employee would go home with a pay packet of 50,000 or 75,000 dollars per year.
In 2007, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, was paid 68.7 million dollars -- described as "the most ever for a Wall Street CEO."
As the entire U.S. economic edifice is in danger of collapsing, the White House has been called upon to save some of the biggest financial institutions in the country and, at the same time, redress the excesses of Wall Street business tycoons who earned multi-million-dollar salaries and extravagant bonuses.
The greed factor in the crisis is that these same tycoons, who are responsible for mismanaging their companies, still insist on continuing with their same lavish lifestyles and lofty salaries even after the massive taxpayer-funded bailout.
But these salaries and bonuses are likely to be curbed as part a return for the bailout package.
Addressing the 192-member General Assembly last week, the President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the economy of any country is "too serious an undertaking to be left in the hands of speculators".
Ethics must also apply to the economy, he said. But, unfortunately, in the race for profits, the ethical factor has ceased to exist.
The president quoted the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado who once said: "We must not allow speculators' profits always to be privatised, while their losses are invariably socialised."
And as a postscript, the Brazilian president added: "We must not allow the burden of the boundless greed of a few to be shouldered by all."
In the 1987 Hollywood movie 'Wall Street,' Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas plays the role of a ruthless corporate raider, Gordon Gekko, who forsakes all business ethics to climb to the highest echelons of the business world.
His speech to a meeting of stock traders is still considered a classic on Wall Street: "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works."
"Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind."
Douglas, who is the U.N.'s goodwill ambassador for disarmament and a "messenger for peace", was at the United Nations last week to participate in the International Day of Peace.
Responding to a reporter who asked him: "Are you saying, Gordon, that greed is not good?," a visibly annoyed Douglas shot back: ""I am not saying that. And my name is not Gordon. He's a character I played 20 years ago."
by Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS - As a spreading financial crisis threatens to deepen the economic recession in the United States, the news of an unprecedented 700-billion-dollar bailout package reverberated through the corridors of the United Nations last week as over 100 world leaders gathered in New York for the annual talk-fest: the 63rd session of the General Assembly.
Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko in the 1987 film "Wall Street." His speech to a meeting of stock traders is still considered a classic on Wall Street: "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works." (File photo)At a time when the United Nations is seeking increased financial assistance from rich nations to help developing countries meet the faltering Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including a 50-percent reduction on extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, the current U.S. economic crisis and its predictably negative fallout overseas is expected to be a major setback.
Addressing delegates last week, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that the current gloomy outlook threatens the well-being of billions of people, "none more so than the poorest of the poor."
"This only compounds the damage [already] being caused by much higher prices for food and fuel", he added.
Ban has called for 72 billion dollars per year in additional external financing to achieve the MDGs by 2015.
As one Asian delegate put it: "The 72 billion is peanuts compared to the 700 billion the White House wants to dish out to save some of the Wall Street firms from going belly up."
"And the urgent needs of developing nations will now be the least of the priorities of the United States and other Western donors," he predicted.
Father Miguel d'Escoto Brockman of Nicaragua, the newly-elected president of the General Assembly, warned that the current financial crisis will have "very serious consequences" that will impede the significant progress, "if indeed any progress is made", towards the targets established by the MDGs, "which are themselves insufficient".
"It is always the poor who pay the price for the unbridled greed and irresponsibility of the powerful," he said, taking a passing shot at the staggering 700-billion-dollar bailout proposed by the administration of President George W. Bush to save the high-stakes investment banks of New York from bankruptcy and collapse.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates that "money doesn't seem to be a problem, when the problem is money".
"Let us look for a moment at what is happening on Wall Street and in financial markets around the world. There, unsound investment threatens the homes and jobs of the middle class," he added.
There is something fundamentally wrong, he argued, "when money seems to be abundant, but funds for investment in people seem so short in supply".
Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding told the General Assembly that the crisis currently rocking the world's financial markets reflects the inadequacy of the regulatory structures that are essential to the effective functioning of any market.
But it is more than that. It represents the failure on the part of the international financial system to facilitate the flow of resources into areas where they can produce real wealth -- not paper wealth, he added.
Golding said the world is not short of capital: "What it lacks are the mechanisms to ensure the efficient utilisation of that capital."
As the economic meltdown in the United States continues, the casualties are piling up both among commercial and investment banks: Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual (allowed to collapse with no government bailout); American International Group, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (allowed to survive with emergency financial assistance, including some from the government); Merrill Lynch has been folded into Bank of America and Citigroup has taken over Wachovia Bank.
The outrage against Wall Street, described as the world's financial capital, is also directed at the high salaried chief executive officers and the middle rung bosses who make multi-million-dollar salaries, with stock options and perks that set them up in a privileged class by themselves.
According to one report, the lowest salary on Wall Street was around 280,000 dollars a year in a country where the average low or middle class employee would go home with a pay packet of 50,000 or 75,000 dollars per year.
In 2007, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, was paid 68.7 million dollars -- described as "the most ever for a Wall Street CEO."
As the entire U.S. economic edifice is in danger of collapsing, the White House has been called upon to save some of the biggest financial institutions in the country and, at the same time, redress the excesses of Wall Street business tycoons who earned multi-million-dollar salaries and extravagant bonuses.
The greed factor in the crisis is that these same tycoons, who are responsible for mismanaging their companies, still insist on continuing with their same lavish lifestyles and lofty salaries even after the massive taxpayer-funded bailout.
But these salaries and bonuses are likely to be curbed as part a return for the bailout package.
Addressing the 192-member General Assembly last week, the President of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the economy of any country is "too serious an undertaking to be left in the hands of speculators".
Ethics must also apply to the economy, he said. But, unfortunately, in the race for profits, the ethical factor has ceased to exist.
The president quoted the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado who once said: "We must not allow speculators' profits always to be privatised, while their losses are invariably socialised."
And as a postscript, the Brazilian president added: "We must not allow the burden of the boundless greed of a few to be shouldered by all."
In the 1987 Hollywood movie 'Wall Street,' Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas plays the role of a ruthless corporate raider, Gordon Gekko, who forsakes all business ethics to climb to the highest echelons of the business world.
His speech to a meeting of stock traders is still considered a classic on Wall Street: "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works."
"Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind."
Douglas, who is the U.N.'s goodwill ambassador for disarmament and a "messenger for peace", was at the United Nations last week to participate in the International Day of Peace.
Responding to a reporter who asked him: "Are you saying, Gordon, that greed is not good?," a visibly annoyed Douglas shot back: ""I am not saying that. And my name is not Gordon. He's a character I played 20 years ago."
Sunday, 28 September 2008
Radio Prog: On the Record mp3 downloads
Copy link into your address bar and download to your I-tunes or media player and then double click on file to play it - enjoy!
http://www.zshare.net/audio/194190845740caa5/
18 September
http://www.zshare.net/audio/194205137031da60/
25 September
http://www.zshare.net/audio/194226739919a000/
2 October
http://www.zshare.net/audio/194190845740caa5/
18 September
http://www.zshare.net/audio/194205137031da60/
25 September
http://www.zshare.net/audio/194226739919a000/
2 October
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
Monday, 8 September 2008
America at Large - George Kimball
AMERICA AT LARGE: ALTHOUGH MOST Americans assume the playing of the national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, prior to baseball games to be a tradition as deeply-rooted as peanuts, hot dogs and chewing tobacco, the practice in fact dates back only to the second World War, writes George Kimball
Since the events of September 11th, 2001, fans in many major league parks have been subjected to a double-dose of patriotism, with God Bless America replacing the time-honoured sing-along of Take Me Out to the Ball Game accompanying the traditional seventh-inning stretch.
In most venues this practice has been limited to special occasions, such as national holidays and opening-day ceremonies, though in some ballparks it has become a staple of Sunday afternoon games as well.
The exception has been New York's Yankee Stadium, where God Bless America has been performed during the seventh inning of every home game for the last seven years, more often than not in a stirring, live rendition by the Dublin-born tenor Ronan Tynan. (When Tynan's increasingly busy concert schedule calls him out of town, the recorded version by the late Kate Smith is played instead.)
The ritual has taken on such solemnity that it is carried live on Yankees' television broadcasts, and the YES network passes up several hundred thousand dollars' worth of commercials to beam it into living-rooms.
Within the confines of the ballpark itself, spectators are asked to "stand and honour America" during this presentation, and although God Bless America is a song devoid of any official status, misty-eyed baseball fans unfailingly remain at attention throughout.
The practice has not been universally embraced by, say, visiting players, who claim that it provides the Yankees with a subtle competitive edge - not because of the overwrought emotions elicited by the song, but because Tynan's version is a notably lengthy one that is inclined to disrupt the rhythm of an opposing pitcher obliged to stand at attention on the mound when he might otherwise be warming up to face the next batter. Suffice it to say, American League pitchers were quietly singing along "God Damn America!" long before the Rev Jeremiah Wright turned it into a catchphrase.
Although many Americans labour under the delusion that the song goes back to the Founding Fathers, God Bless America was written in 1918 by Irving Berlin. The composer of White Christmas and Blue Skies had initially intended it for a review called Yip Yip Yaphank, but when it failed to make the final cut, the song lay dormant for two decades.
In 1938, with the clouds of war gathering in Europe, Berlin retrieved God Bless America in a version popularised by Ms Smith on her radio programme. Even then, the lyric was considered so provocatively jingoistic that Woody Guthrie said he wrote This Land is Your Land as a direct response.
Three decades ago, God Bless America enjoyed something of a renaissance following its ironic inclusion in Michael Cimino's Oscar- winning Vietnam-era film The Deer Hunter, and in the post-9/11 years it has been appropriated as a slogan of the right. You can almost take it for granted that a car bearing one of those God Bless America decals will have an old Bush bumpersticker as well.
If God Bless America has been co-opted by the right, so, too, has Ronan Tynan - by both the pro-Iraq lobby and by the Yankees. With regard to the latter, Dr Tynan's schedule this month not only includes Yankee Stadium dates for both next week's 9/11 anniversary and September 21st, the final game to be played in the about-to-be razed stadium, but a performance this Saturday at St Patrick's Cathedral for a Mass marking the 60th anniversary of Babe Ruth's death.
Apparently the Republicans' favourite Irish tenor, Tynan has performed at several White House receptions, at George HW Bush's 80th birthday celebration and at the state funeral for Ronald Reagan.
Now, as much as I might admire Tynan's voice, over the years I've come to regard the drum roll for God Bless America at Yankee Stadium as the signal to head outside for a smoke break, and it should probably be noted that nobody ever tried to discourage me.
It seems Brad Campeau-Laurion was not so fortunate. Turns out the Yankees have a rule restricting patrons from moving in the stands during God Bless America, and stadium ushers, security personnel and NYPD detail cops have been instructed to enforce it.
A bespectacled, thirtysomething resident of Queens, Campeau-Laurion was present, along with 55,057 others, for a game against the Boston Red Sox in the Bronx last week. In the middle of the seventh inning he decided to heed the call of nature and headed off for the jacks, only to find his way barred by a New York policeman, who ordered him to remain standing in place until God Bless America had concluded.
When Campeau-Laurion replied "I don't care about God Bless America, I just need to use the bathroom", he says, two cops pinned his arms behind his back and hustled him toward the nearest exit.
The policemen, according to Campeau-Laurion, "shoved me out the front gate and told me to get out of their country if I didn't like it".
Since no newspaper covered the incident, it developed as a slow-boiling issue that didn't come to light until Campeau-Laurion took his story to New York's CBS affiliate. Since being aired on television, this tale of the bladder denied has taken on a life of its own.
By yesterday an internet page - on mlb.fanhouse.com - devoted to the subject had received 247 posts. Some of them are sympathetic to Campeau-Laurion's plight. Others include thoughtful responses like "Who cares if some French a**hole got kicked out of Yankee Stadium? Rules are Rules," and "You must be one of those liberal America-hating a**holes".
Noting that God Bless America is not the national anthem, and in fact has no official status at all, Campeau-Laurion is threatening to sue the Yankees over his ejection. The baseball team have referred all inquiries to the NYPD. The cops, predictably, have claimed that Campeau-Laurion was "acting in a disorderly manner while reeking of alcohol", a contention more neutral eyewitnesses have termed "ridiculous".
If it does go to court, of course, the Yankees' attempt to enforce patriotism will be at the heart of the litigation. Or, as one of the more imaginative online responses to the episode noted this week, "if God hadn't intended us to urinate at baseball games, He wouldn't have invented the relief pitcher".
© 2008 The Irish Times
Since the events of September 11th, 2001, fans in many major league parks have been subjected to a double-dose of patriotism, with God Bless America replacing the time-honoured sing-along of Take Me Out to the Ball Game accompanying the traditional seventh-inning stretch.
In most venues this practice has been limited to special occasions, such as national holidays and opening-day ceremonies, though in some ballparks it has become a staple of Sunday afternoon games as well.
The exception has been New York's Yankee Stadium, where God Bless America has been performed during the seventh inning of every home game for the last seven years, more often than not in a stirring, live rendition by the Dublin-born tenor Ronan Tynan. (When Tynan's increasingly busy concert schedule calls him out of town, the recorded version by the late Kate Smith is played instead.)
The ritual has taken on such solemnity that it is carried live on Yankees' television broadcasts, and the YES network passes up several hundred thousand dollars' worth of commercials to beam it into living-rooms.
Within the confines of the ballpark itself, spectators are asked to "stand and honour America" during this presentation, and although God Bless America is a song devoid of any official status, misty-eyed baseball fans unfailingly remain at attention throughout.
The practice has not been universally embraced by, say, visiting players, who claim that it provides the Yankees with a subtle competitive edge - not because of the overwrought emotions elicited by the song, but because Tynan's version is a notably lengthy one that is inclined to disrupt the rhythm of an opposing pitcher obliged to stand at attention on the mound when he might otherwise be warming up to face the next batter. Suffice it to say, American League pitchers were quietly singing along "God Damn America!" long before the Rev Jeremiah Wright turned it into a catchphrase.
Although many Americans labour under the delusion that the song goes back to the Founding Fathers, God Bless America was written in 1918 by Irving Berlin. The composer of White Christmas and Blue Skies had initially intended it for a review called Yip Yip Yaphank, but when it failed to make the final cut, the song lay dormant for two decades.
In 1938, with the clouds of war gathering in Europe, Berlin retrieved God Bless America in a version popularised by Ms Smith on her radio programme. Even then, the lyric was considered so provocatively jingoistic that Woody Guthrie said he wrote This Land is Your Land as a direct response.
Three decades ago, God Bless America enjoyed something of a renaissance following its ironic inclusion in Michael Cimino's Oscar- winning Vietnam-era film The Deer Hunter, and in the post-9/11 years it has been appropriated as a slogan of the right. You can almost take it for granted that a car bearing one of those God Bless America decals will have an old Bush bumpersticker as well.
If God Bless America has been co-opted by the right, so, too, has Ronan Tynan - by both the pro-Iraq lobby and by the Yankees. With regard to the latter, Dr Tynan's schedule this month not only includes Yankee Stadium dates for both next week's 9/11 anniversary and September 21st, the final game to be played in the about-to-be razed stadium, but a performance this Saturday at St Patrick's Cathedral for a Mass marking the 60th anniversary of Babe Ruth's death.
Apparently the Republicans' favourite Irish tenor, Tynan has performed at several White House receptions, at George HW Bush's 80th birthday celebration and at the state funeral for Ronald Reagan.
Now, as much as I might admire Tynan's voice, over the years I've come to regard the drum roll for God Bless America at Yankee Stadium as the signal to head outside for a smoke break, and it should probably be noted that nobody ever tried to discourage me.
It seems Brad Campeau-Laurion was not so fortunate. Turns out the Yankees have a rule restricting patrons from moving in the stands during God Bless America, and stadium ushers, security personnel and NYPD detail cops have been instructed to enforce it.
A bespectacled, thirtysomething resident of Queens, Campeau-Laurion was present, along with 55,057 others, for a game against the Boston Red Sox in the Bronx last week. In the middle of the seventh inning he decided to heed the call of nature and headed off for the jacks, only to find his way barred by a New York policeman, who ordered him to remain standing in place until God Bless America had concluded.
When Campeau-Laurion replied "I don't care about God Bless America, I just need to use the bathroom", he says, two cops pinned his arms behind his back and hustled him toward the nearest exit.
The policemen, according to Campeau-Laurion, "shoved me out the front gate and told me to get out of their country if I didn't like it".
Since no newspaper covered the incident, it developed as a slow-boiling issue that didn't come to light until Campeau-Laurion took his story to New York's CBS affiliate. Since being aired on television, this tale of the bladder denied has taken on a life of its own.
By yesterday an internet page - on mlb.fanhouse.com - devoted to the subject had received 247 posts. Some of them are sympathetic to Campeau-Laurion's plight. Others include thoughtful responses like "Who cares if some French a**hole got kicked out of Yankee Stadium? Rules are Rules," and "You must be one of those liberal America-hating a**holes".
Noting that God Bless America is not the national anthem, and in fact has no official status at all, Campeau-Laurion is threatening to sue the Yankees over his ejection. The baseball team have referred all inquiries to the NYPD. The cops, predictably, have claimed that Campeau-Laurion was "acting in a disorderly manner while reeking of alcohol", a contention more neutral eyewitnesses have termed "ridiculous".
If it does go to court, of course, the Yankees' attempt to enforce patriotism will be at the heart of the litigation. Or, as one of the more imaginative online responses to the episode noted this week, "if God hadn't intended us to urinate at baseball games, He wouldn't have invented the relief pitcher".
© 2008 The Irish Times
Friday, 5 September 2008
On the Record 18 Sep
Hello!
You can click on the link to download my latest radio prog as an mp3 file to your media player/i tunes. Hope you enjoy it and spread the word amigos!
Thanks,
Niall
https://www.yousendit.com/download/bVlCeVdyTEREbUx2Wmc9PQ
You can click on the link to download my latest radio prog as an mp3 file to your media player/i tunes. Hope you enjoy it and spread the word amigos!
Thanks,
Niall
https://www.yousendit.com/download/bVlCeVdyTEREbUx2Wmc9PQ
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Friday, 29 August 2008
On the Record 4 Sept
Click on link to download radio show as an mp3 file:
http://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01IZm1aMGs0b0JjR0E9PQ
http://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01IZm1aMGs0b0JjR0E9PQ
On the Record 11 Sept
Click on link to download Radio show as an mp3 file from:
https://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01IZm1aQk5lM1R2Wmc9PQ
https://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01IZm1aQk5lM1R2Wmc9PQ
Monday, 25 August 2008
Sunday, 24 August 2008
Radio Prog: On the Record 21 Aug
Click on link to download my radio show as an mp3 for your i-tunes/media player:
http://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01FbGtLbEpRYTlFQlE9PQ
http://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01FbGtLbEpRYTlFQlE9PQ
Radio Prog: On the Record 28 Aug
Click on link to download my radio show as an mp3 for your i-tunes/media player:
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Monday, 18 August 2008
Duh web...Duh!
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Byron - She Walks In Beauty
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender lightWhich heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
17 Aug 08: Tyrone 3-14 Dublin 1-8
Tyrone: J Devine; R McMenamin, Justin McMahon, C Gourley; D Harte (1-01), C Gormley (0-01), P Jordan; C Holmes, E McGinley (0-01); B Dooher (capt) (0-03), B McGuigan, Joe McMahon (1-01); T McGuigan (0-02), S Cavanagh (1-02 (0-01f)), C McCullagh (0-03).
Subs used: M Penrose for T McGuigan (56 mins), D McCaul for Jordan (63), R Mellon for Dooher (65), K Hughes for Holmes (66), O Mulligan for B McGuigan (68).
Dublin: S Cluxton; D Henry, R McConnell, P Griffin; C Moran, B Cullen, B Cahill (0-01); C Whelan, S Ryan; D Connolly, J Sherlock, K Bonner; A Brogan (capt), C Keaney (1-01), T Quinn (0-02, 2f).
Subs used: B Brogan (0-03) for A Brogan (6 mins, inj), P Casey for Connolly (48), M Vaughan (0-01, 1f) for Sherlock, P McMahon for Quinn (both 54), E Fennell for McConnell (63).
Referee: Aidan Mangan (Kerry).
Subs used: M Penrose for T McGuigan (56 mins), D McCaul for Jordan (63), R Mellon for Dooher (65), K Hughes for Holmes (66), O Mulligan for B McGuigan (68).
Dublin: S Cluxton; D Henry, R McConnell, P Griffin; C Moran, B Cullen, B Cahill (0-01); C Whelan, S Ryan; D Connolly, J Sherlock, K Bonner; A Brogan (capt), C Keaney (1-01), T Quinn (0-02, 2f).
Subs used: B Brogan (0-03) for A Brogan (6 mins, inj), P Casey for Connolly (48), M Vaughan (0-01, 1f) for Sherlock, P McMahon for Quinn (both 54), E Fennell for McConnell (63).
Referee: Aidan Mangan (Kerry).
Saturday, 16 August 2008
The magic of McGahern
As a teenager, Joseph O'Connor was so enthralled by the work of John McGahern he spent many evenings copying out - then reworking - one of his exquisite short stories. It taught him how to become a writer.
The first short story I wrote was a work of genius. It was austere and lovely, full of elegant sentences and sharp insights. Any reviewer would have called it tremendously impressive. Because the first short story I wrote was by John McGahern. It's called "Sierra Leone" and it appears in the 1979 collection Getting Through, a copy of which had been purchased by my father. A keen reader of Irish fiction, he felt always, like my late mother, a particular respect for McGahern, who had suffered much through being true to his calling. McGahern's novel The Dark had been banned in Ireland for obscenity, and its author had lost his job as a teacher. But, remarkably, he seemed accepting of fate and circumstance. He simply kept writing, never complained. He did not make appearances on chat shows.
The Dark by John Mcgahern Faber, £6.99 Buy it at the Guardian bookshop In "Sierra Leone", two lovers meet in a Dublin bar to analyse their complicated affair. I was 16 the year I first read it. Complicated affairs interested me. My English teacher, John Burns, a wonderful man, who would rage like Lear and weep at a line of Yeats, said writing could be a beneficial pastime for teenagers. It was the one thing he ever told us that was completely wrong.
Writing was like attempting to juggle with mud. I would sit in my bedroom, gawping at a blank jotter, wishing I had the foggiest inkling as to what might be written. This McGahern fellow - he was good, my parents were right - often wrote about rural Leitrim and the wilds of Roscommon, and crops, and cows, and taking in the hay, and buckets, and threshing, and artificial inseminators. But we had no hedgerows or calves in the 1970s Dublin estate I called home. We had no thwarted farmers, no maiden aunts on bicycles, no small-town solicitors, no cattle-dealing IRA veterans, and few enough inseminations, or opportunities for same, of even the non-artificial kind. Simply put, there was nothing in Glenageary to write about. You could call it the original failure of the creative imagination without which no writer ever got going.
Whenever I tried to write, there was only frustration. One evening, in dismal hopelessness, I found myself copying out "Sierra Leone" word for word. I ached to write a story. So I wrote one of his. I must have felt that the act of writing would make the words somehow mine. I suppose it was comparable to aspirant pop-stars throwing shapes and pulling pouts in the bathroom mirror. But something richer and more interesting was going on, too. McGahern was teaching me to read, not to write: to see the presences hidden in the crannies of a text, the realities the words are gesturing towards. Perhaps this is what pulses at the core of the desire to read: the yearning for intense communion with words we love. Not just with what they are saying, but with the words themselves. Perhaps every reader is re-writing the story.
A couple of evenings later, I transcribed the McGahern piece again. This time I dared to alter a couple of names. The male lead became Sean (my father's name). I christened his girlfriend Deborah (after the punk singer Debbie Harry). Our next-door neighbour, Jack Mulcahy, had his name nicked for the barman. This felt taboo. It was like editing the Bible. I was raised in a home where books were revered. My parents considered it disreputable even to dog-ear a volume's pages. To interfere with a story would have been regarded as a form of sacrilege. Under the spell of McGahern, I became a teenage blasphemer.
Every few nights I'd guiltily rewrite the latest adaptation, changing the grammar here, a phrasing there. I'd move around events, break up the paragraphs, or tell exactly the same story from a different point of view. (In which case, of course, it would not be the same story at all - an important lesson in itself.) I must have written 30 or 40 versions. The heroine's black hair became auburn or yellow, and finally - exultantly! - "strawberry blonde". I learned the importance of punctuation in a story. A question mark could change things. A well-placed full stop had the force of a slap. Before long, I was murdering McGahern's masterfully sculpted characters, replacing them with my own pitifully scanty puppets. The pub became a discotheque, the couple acquired flares; I engaged them, married them, bought them a bungalow in the suburbs, then a collection of Planxty records and a second-hand lawnmower. The lovers in the story were starting to seem familiar. They would not have appeared out of place in Arnold Grove, Glenageary.
I rechristened them "Adam and Eve", after a church on the Dublin quays not far from my father's childhood home. I altered their appearances, their way of speaking. I was afraid to admit it, but I knew who they were becoming. They roamed this fictive otherworld, this Eden designed in Leitrim, talking to each other about all sorts of things: how much they loved novels, how books shouldn't be dog-eared. Sometimes they quarrelled. I would have them reconcile. I could almost feel the firelight of that pub on my face as I watched my parents materialise through the prose.
At one point I could have made a reasonable stab at reciting the entire text of "Sierra Leone" by heart. It appeared breathtakingly simple, as though it had taken no effort to compose. I recall, as I write now, one of the short, plain sentences: "Her hair shone dark blue in the light." It is a sentence that could be written by almost anyone, but few writers are as aware as McGahern was of that strange ache in the heart caused by ordinary precise words, placed carefully, in order, quietly.
Each man kills the thing he loves. And so the vandalism continued, over many an evening, with me editing and rewriting this once perfect story, slashing and burning, twisting, demolishing, with all the respectful deference of a wrecking ball in a cathedral, until gradually, over the span of my teenage years, every trace of McGahern was bludgeoned out of the text. Sierra Leone had become Glenageary. The story had been desecrated, but at least the resulting ruin was mine.
When, once, in my later life, I had the opportunity of relating this tale of destruction to the master whose work I had so abused, he replied, somewhat gravely: "Mine's a pint."
Dublin appears again and again in McGahern's work, sometimes at a distance but often centrally. His exquisite short stories are peopled by migrant characters who see the metropolis as labyrinth of possibilities. Here is a Dublin of tatty dancehalls and uneasy courtships, of kisses in damp doorways and unfulfilled hungerings. His citizens are stalwarts of the city's rural-born workforce, who take the first available bus home to the countryside on a Friday evening and the last one back to Bedsit-Land on a Sunday night. They are, in short, like most Dubliners were at the time, and as many are now, despite the new prosperity. Their flings and farewells make for writing of extraordinary beauty, with the city as forlorn backdrop to the search for love.
McGahern's work acknowledges that Dublin (like capitals everywhere) is largely a community of migrants with conflicted loyalties. And I think of his explorations - so destabilising in their way - as opening a path for a number of subsequent writers. In that context, it is striking that much of the most compelling fiction about the city has been produced by authors who grew up somewhere else. Ulsterman Patrick McCabe's The Dead School and London-born Philip Casey's The Fabulists offer commanding reflections on a place that changed radically in the 1970s, as political failure and corruption began to wreak havoc. In The Book of Evidence, Wexford-born John Banville produced a spellbinding novel set in the furtive Dublin of that Gubu era, a nighttown of whispered secrets and compromised positions. I find it hard to imagine how these and other great novels could have been written without the presence of McGahern on the Irish scene. For me, he looms behind everyone: an Easter Island figure, with the ineluctable shadow - and the sternness - suggested by such an embodiment.
At University College Dublin in the 80s, I read The Barracks, The Dark and more of the stories. I found them strange, always enthralling, stylistically flawless, but more touching than almost anything I had read. His account, clearly autobiographical, of a young man's early days at university - the first of his family ever to know such an experience - moves me still. At the time, the vogue among my friends was for Latin American magic realism. In those years, it often seemed that no novel was worthy of the name unless it contained a talking leopard or a 15-page sentence. Against this blizzard of vowelly pyrotechnics McGahern's work stood solid, starkly implacable, like a dry-stone wall in a windstorm. I loved its quiet faith, its insistence on its own terms. And then came his masterpiece Amongst Women, the most important Irish novel of my lifetime.
So much has been written and said about this sparely magnificent book. It conjures a world that is absolutely specific to itself, down to the most minuscule, seemingly inconsequential detail, but in so doing achieves the alchemy of saying something about every life. Not for nothing did this novel become a perennial bestseller in Ireland, as well as being garlanded with critical accolades. The family it depicts is somehow every Irish family of a certain era, held together by its secrets, bound by its evasions, by a nexus of loyalties, only one of which is love. Indeed, it is difficult not to read the Morans as embodying the uneasy nation in which they exist.
The book draws so subtly from that well of Irish familial images and returns them to us reimagined, made wholly new. Moran, the disillusioned republican, burnished hard by pain, walks through the book like a living ghost, through drifts of memories of nights on the run, promises broken, responsibilities ducked. A man grown strange, even to himself, so brutal yet impossible to hate. The episode at Moran's funeral, is the most powerful fictional scene I have read since my adolescence. We see the local hacks of the two conservative parties snickering together in the rural cemetery, as the embittered old revolutionary is finally buried. Sometimes great writers know things they don't know. This tableau was composed a decade before the Celtic Tiger padded into Ireland, but it is the most ruthless comment imaginable on that ambiguous, sharp-toothed beast.
His final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, took 11 years to make and surprised many of its creator's admirers by addressing that rarest of Irish literary subjects: happiness. Here on the lakeside, near to Gloria Bog, little is happening beyond the everyday syncopations - yet, as ever, McGahern unearths resonant beauty. Gossip is a currency, as always in Ireland, and his dialogue abounds with the juiciness of popular speech. It is his most audaciously structured book, almost completely devoid of plot, suggesting reams about its characters while rarely telling you anything about them. Reading it is like reading everything he wrote - like moving to a place you've never lived in before, where you don't know the neighbours or how things work. But thanks to his artistry, you want to know them.
Not long after his death, Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories was published, a sort of correction to the Collected Stories that had appeared to great acclaim in 1992. The later collection is the finest body of short stories published by any Irish writer in recent years, and serves as a moving valediction to the characters McGahern made his own. They drift through these unforgettable and assiduously crafted miniatures like the archetypes of a modern folklore: the inarticulate lover, the distant, damaged father, the ill-used stepmother, the pilgrim between two worlds, the schoolteacher who doubts or despises his vocation, the sufferer of sexual loneliness. Several times we encounter the former student for the Catholic priesthood who abandoned that path on the verge of ordination. Again and again, there is the desperate invitation to marry, usually dismissed or evaded, misunderstood. These are lives marked by abrupt turnings, roads not taken, promises broken, the hopes of childhood crushed, but somehow a faith in the world survives, a notion that redemption is possible.
The first short story I wrote was a work of genius. It was austere and lovely, full of elegant sentences and sharp insights. Any reviewer would have called it tremendously impressive. Because the first short story I wrote was by John McGahern. It's called "Sierra Leone" and it appears in the 1979 collection Getting Through, a copy of which had been purchased by my father. A keen reader of Irish fiction, he felt always, like my late mother, a particular respect for McGahern, who had suffered much through being true to his calling. McGahern's novel The Dark had been banned in Ireland for obscenity, and its author had lost his job as a teacher. But, remarkably, he seemed accepting of fate and circumstance. He simply kept writing, never complained. He did not make appearances on chat shows.
The Dark by John Mcgahern Faber, £6.99 Buy it at the Guardian bookshop In "Sierra Leone", two lovers meet in a Dublin bar to analyse their complicated affair. I was 16 the year I first read it. Complicated affairs interested me. My English teacher, John Burns, a wonderful man, who would rage like Lear and weep at a line of Yeats, said writing could be a beneficial pastime for teenagers. It was the one thing he ever told us that was completely wrong.
Writing was like attempting to juggle with mud. I would sit in my bedroom, gawping at a blank jotter, wishing I had the foggiest inkling as to what might be written. This McGahern fellow - he was good, my parents were right - often wrote about rural Leitrim and the wilds of Roscommon, and crops, and cows, and taking in the hay, and buckets, and threshing, and artificial inseminators. But we had no hedgerows or calves in the 1970s Dublin estate I called home. We had no thwarted farmers, no maiden aunts on bicycles, no small-town solicitors, no cattle-dealing IRA veterans, and few enough inseminations, or opportunities for same, of even the non-artificial kind. Simply put, there was nothing in Glenageary to write about. You could call it the original failure of the creative imagination without which no writer ever got going.
Whenever I tried to write, there was only frustration. One evening, in dismal hopelessness, I found myself copying out "Sierra Leone" word for word. I ached to write a story. So I wrote one of his. I must have felt that the act of writing would make the words somehow mine. I suppose it was comparable to aspirant pop-stars throwing shapes and pulling pouts in the bathroom mirror. But something richer and more interesting was going on, too. McGahern was teaching me to read, not to write: to see the presences hidden in the crannies of a text, the realities the words are gesturing towards. Perhaps this is what pulses at the core of the desire to read: the yearning for intense communion with words we love. Not just with what they are saying, but with the words themselves. Perhaps every reader is re-writing the story.
A couple of evenings later, I transcribed the McGahern piece again. This time I dared to alter a couple of names. The male lead became Sean (my father's name). I christened his girlfriend Deborah (after the punk singer Debbie Harry). Our next-door neighbour, Jack Mulcahy, had his name nicked for the barman. This felt taboo. It was like editing the Bible. I was raised in a home where books were revered. My parents considered it disreputable even to dog-ear a volume's pages. To interfere with a story would have been regarded as a form of sacrilege. Under the spell of McGahern, I became a teenage blasphemer.
Every few nights I'd guiltily rewrite the latest adaptation, changing the grammar here, a phrasing there. I'd move around events, break up the paragraphs, or tell exactly the same story from a different point of view. (In which case, of course, it would not be the same story at all - an important lesson in itself.) I must have written 30 or 40 versions. The heroine's black hair became auburn or yellow, and finally - exultantly! - "strawberry blonde". I learned the importance of punctuation in a story. A question mark could change things. A well-placed full stop had the force of a slap. Before long, I was murdering McGahern's masterfully sculpted characters, replacing them with my own pitifully scanty puppets. The pub became a discotheque, the couple acquired flares; I engaged them, married them, bought them a bungalow in the suburbs, then a collection of Planxty records and a second-hand lawnmower. The lovers in the story were starting to seem familiar. They would not have appeared out of place in Arnold Grove, Glenageary.
I rechristened them "Adam and Eve", after a church on the Dublin quays not far from my father's childhood home. I altered their appearances, their way of speaking. I was afraid to admit it, but I knew who they were becoming. They roamed this fictive otherworld, this Eden designed in Leitrim, talking to each other about all sorts of things: how much they loved novels, how books shouldn't be dog-eared. Sometimes they quarrelled. I would have them reconcile. I could almost feel the firelight of that pub on my face as I watched my parents materialise through the prose.
At one point I could have made a reasonable stab at reciting the entire text of "Sierra Leone" by heart. It appeared breathtakingly simple, as though it had taken no effort to compose. I recall, as I write now, one of the short, plain sentences: "Her hair shone dark blue in the light." It is a sentence that could be written by almost anyone, but few writers are as aware as McGahern was of that strange ache in the heart caused by ordinary precise words, placed carefully, in order, quietly.
Each man kills the thing he loves. And so the vandalism continued, over many an evening, with me editing and rewriting this once perfect story, slashing and burning, twisting, demolishing, with all the respectful deference of a wrecking ball in a cathedral, until gradually, over the span of my teenage years, every trace of McGahern was bludgeoned out of the text. Sierra Leone had become Glenageary. The story had been desecrated, but at least the resulting ruin was mine.
When, once, in my later life, I had the opportunity of relating this tale of destruction to the master whose work I had so abused, he replied, somewhat gravely: "Mine's a pint."
Dublin appears again and again in McGahern's work, sometimes at a distance but often centrally. His exquisite short stories are peopled by migrant characters who see the metropolis as labyrinth of possibilities. Here is a Dublin of tatty dancehalls and uneasy courtships, of kisses in damp doorways and unfulfilled hungerings. His citizens are stalwarts of the city's rural-born workforce, who take the first available bus home to the countryside on a Friday evening and the last one back to Bedsit-Land on a Sunday night. They are, in short, like most Dubliners were at the time, and as many are now, despite the new prosperity. Their flings and farewells make for writing of extraordinary beauty, with the city as forlorn backdrop to the search for love.
McGahern's work acknowledges that Dublin (like capitals everywhere) is largely a community of migrants with conflicted loyalties. And I think of his explorations - so destabilising in their way - as opening a path for a number of subsequent writers. In that context, it is striking that much of the most compelling fiction about the city has been produced by authors who grew up somewhere else. Ulsterman Patrick McCabe's The Dead School and London-born Philip Casey's The Fabulists offer commanding reflections on a place that changed radically in the 1970s, as political failure and corruption began to wreak havoc. In The Book of Evidence, Wexford-born John Banville produced a spellbinding novel set in the furtive Dublin of that Gubu era, a nighttown of whispered secrets and compromised positions. I find it hard to imagine how these and other great novels could have been written without the presence of McGahern on the Irish scene. For me, he looms behind everyone: an Easter Island figure, with the ineluctable shadow - and the sternness - suggested by such an embodiment.
At University College Dublin in the 80s, I read The Barracks, The Dark and more of the stories. I found them strange, always enthralling, stylistically flawless, but more touching than almost anything I had read. His account, clearly autobiographical, of a young man's early days at university - the first of his family ever to know such an experience - moves me still. At the time, the vogue among my friends was for Latin American magic realism. In those years, it often seemed that no novel was worthy of the name unless it contained a talking leopard or a 15-page sentence. Against this blizzard of vowelly pyrotechnics McGahern's work stood solid, starkly implacable, like a dry-stone wall in a windstorm. I loved its quiet faith, its insistence on its own terms. And then came his masterpiece Amongst Women, the most important Irish novel of my lifetime.
So much has been written and said about this sparely magnificent book. It conjures a world that is absolutely specific to itself, down to the most minuscule, seemingly inconsequential detail, but in so doing achieves the alchemy of saying something about every life. Not for nothing did this novel become a perennial bestseller in Ireland, as well as being garlanded with critical accolades. The family it depicts is somehow every Irish family of a certain era, held together by its secrets, bound by its evasions, by a nexus of loyalties, only one of which is love. Indeed, it is difficult not to read the Morans as embodying the uneasy nation in which they exist.
The book draws so subtly from that well of Irish familial images and returns them to us reimagined, made wholly new. Moran, the disillusioned republican, burnished hard by pain, walks through the book like a living ghost, through drifts of memories of nights on the run, promises broken, responsibilities ducked. A man grown strange, even to himself, so brutal yet impossible to hate. The episode at Moran's funeral, is the most powerful fictional scene I have read since my adolescence. We see the local hacks of the two conservative parties snickering together in the rural cemetery, as the embittered old revolutionary is finally buried. Sometimes great writers know things they don't know. This tableau was composed a decade before the Celtic Tiger padded into Ireland, but it is the most ruthless comment imaginable on that ambiguous, sharp-toothed beast.
His final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, took 11 years to make and surprised many of its creator's admirers by addressing that rarest of Irish literary subjects: happiness. Here on the lakeside, near to Gloria Bog, little is happening beyond the everyday syncopations - yet, as ever, McGahern unearths resonant beauty. Gossip is a currency, as always in Ireland, and his dialogue abounds with the juiciness of popular speech. It is his most audaciously structured book, almost completely devoid of plot, suggesting reams about its characters while rarely telling you anything about them. Reading it is like reading everything he wrote - like moving to a place you've never lived in before, where you don't know the neighbours or how things work. But thanks to his artistry, you want to know them.
Not long after his death, Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories was published, a sort of correction to the Collected Stories that had appeared to great acclaim in 1992. The later collection is the finest body of short stories published by any Irish writer in recent years, and serves as a moving valediction to the characters McGahern made his own. They drift through these unforgettable and assiduously crafted miniatures like the archetypes of a modern folklore: the inarticulate lover, the distant, damaged father, the ill-used stepmother, the pilgrim between two worlds, the schoolteacher who doubts or despises his vocation, the sufferer of sexual loneliness. Several times we encounter the former student for the Catholic priesthood who abandoned that path on the verge of ordination. Again and again, there is the desperate invitation to marry, usually dismissed or evaded, misunderstood. These are lives marked by abrupt turnings, roads not taken, promises broken, the hopes of childhood crushed, but somehow a faith in the world survives, a notion that redemption is possible.
Friday, 15 August 2008
Stupid words creeping into our language No.2
Literally: A dumbo overheard saying: 'I was literally bowled over by the news'. Aye right, hi! Were you playing cricket at the time, my friend.
Another dumbo overheard saying: 'The film literally blew my head off'. If only, fool!
Another dumbo overheard saying: 'The film literally blew my head off'. If only, fool!
Stupid words creeping into our language No.1
Closure: the act of closing; the state of being closed; a bringing to an end; conclusion.
Such an American word that you hear more and more of these days, especially in the media. People, we don't live in an episode of Friends or Greys Anatomy, so lets not try to talk like we do. Why not use such far out words instead as: conclusion, end, draw a line under, finish or bring to a close.
It's, like, so much, like, more natural!
Such an American word that you hear more and more of these days, especially in the media. People, we don't live in an episode of Friends or Greys Anatomy, so lets not try to talk like we do. Why not use such far out words instead as: conclusion, end, draw a line under, finish or bring to a close.
It's, like, so much, like, more natural!
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Mark Twain
"Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Cool radio stations
Sub FM: http://www.sub.fm/
Kitchen Sisters: www.kitchensisters.org
FiP: www.tinyurl.com/574gx6
WFMU: www.wfmu.org
Resonance FM: www.resonancefm.com
Speechification: www.speechification.org
Touch Radio: www.touchradio.org.uk www.peoplelikeus.org
Kitchen Sisters: www.kitchensisters.org
FiP: www.tinyurl.com/574gx6
WFMU: www.wfmu.org
Resonance FM: www.resonancefm.com
Speechification: www.speechification.org
Touch Radio: www.touchradio.org.uk www.peoplelikeus.org
Madness or genius?
I still haven't made up my mind yet - but hey it'll cut your carbon footprint! One for the headphones definitely:
www.soundtransit.nl
www.soundtransit.nl
Monday, 11 August 2008
China’s netizens swarm amnesty.org
Thousands of netizens in China seized the chance to check out Amnesty International’s main website after it was unblocked in China for the first time, on 1 Aug.
The Chinese cyber-police’s unprecedented move came after international journalists discovered, upon arrival in Beijing for the Olympic Games, that numerous websites - such as those of Wikipedia and BBC Chinese - were blocked inside Olympic media venues. About 30,000 reporters from around the world are expected to cover the Games.
Within the first four days, Amnesty.org received about 14,000 visitors from China — nearly 30 times the visitor count for July. To welcome the new visitors, the organization is now installing a Chinese language section.
Unblocking the sites is a monumental move for the Chinese government especially when it appeared to be tightening its control over media in recent years by banning websites and detaining journalists.
www.amnesty.org/
The Chinese cyber-police’s unprecedented move came after international journalists discovered, upon arrival in Beijing for the Olympic Games, that numerous websites - such as those of Wikipedia and BBC Chinese - were blocked inside Olympic media venues. About 30,000 reporters from around the world are expected to cover the Games.
Within the first four days, Amnesty.org received about 14,000 visitors from China — nearly 30 times the visitor count for July. To welcome the new visitors, the organization is now installing a Chinese language section.
Unblocking the sites is a monumental move for the Chinese government especially when it appeared to be tightening its control over media in recent years by banning websites and detaining journalists.
www.amnesty.org/
Sunday, 10 August 2008
Saturday, 9 August 2008
William Faulkner
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
Best magazine covers
Hmmm... not a great selection in my opinion, I imagine there may be better out there. But if I had to choose it would be no.8.
"And it seemed to me that you would live your life like a candle in the wiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnndddd!"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/gallery/2008/aug/08/pressandpublishing?picture=336315452
"And it seemed to me that you would live your life like a candle in the wiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnndddd!"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/gallery/2008/aug/08/pressandpublishing?picture=336315452
James Blackshaw
This young fookin' genius is playing in the Chapel, Trinity College on Thursday evening 14th August and tickets are free - free in Dublin I tell ye! You can pick them up at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in the college.
http://www.myspace.com/jamesblackshaw
http://www.myspace.com/jamesblackshaw
Friday, 8 August 2008
Right turn Clyde
Lucky man
Alex Cox
Clint Eastwood is acclaimed for his work as both an actor and a director,but the Hollywood star owes everything to the genius of his mentor SergioLeone
http://www.newstatesman.com/200808070029
Alex Cox
Clint Eastwood is acclaimed for his work as both an actor and a director,but the Hollywood star owes everything to the genius of his mentor SergioLeone
http://www.newstatesman.com/200808070029
The Maestro
FILM LEGEND ENNIO MORRICONE TO OPEN THIS YEAR'S ULSTER BANK BELFAST FESTIVAL AT QUEEN'S
Telephone bookings can be made via the Waterfront Box Office(028) 9033 4455
DUE TO DEMAND, EXTRA DATE ADDED - 18TH OCTOBER
Ennio Morricone, the Italian maestro behind some of the most instantly recognisable film music of the last forty years, will visit this island for the first time to perform his only UK and Ireland engagement this year at the Opening Concert of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's.
This is a rare live appearance by the Oscar-winning film legend - undoubtedly one of the most skilled, prolific and influential film composers in history. The eagerly anticipated concert takes place at Belfast's Waterfront Hall on Friday 17th October, just days before Morricone's 80th birthday. He will conduct the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra and Belfast Philharmonic Choir, with over 100 musicians flying to Belfast especially for the occasion.
Tickets are certain to be snapped up quickly by fans of Morricone who will savour a mouth-watering selection of some of his most unforgettable music. His distinguished repertoire includes Once Upon a Time in America, Days of Heaven, The Untouchables, the intimate Cinema Paradiso and the enormously popular score for The Mission which starred Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons.
Ennio Morricone has won five BAFTAs for Best Score and been nominated five times for an Oscar. He finally received an Honorary Academy Award in 2007 "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music". He is only the second composer in Oscar history to be honoured with such an award.
http://www.waterfront.co.uk/whatson/performancedetails.aspx?id=39203
Telephone bookings can be made via the Waterfront Box Office(028) 9033 4455
DUE TO DEMAND, EXTRA DATE ADDED - 18TH OCTOBER
Ennio Morricone, the Italian maestro behind some of the most instantly recognisable film music of the last forty years, will visit this island for the first time to perform his only UK and Ireland engagement this year at the Opening Concert of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's.
This is a rare live appearance by the Oscar-winning film legend - undoubtedly one of the most skilled, prolific and influential film composers in history. The eagerly anticipated concert takes place at Belfast's Waterfront Hall on Friday 17th October, just days before Morricone's 80th birthday. He will conduct the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra and Belfast Philharmonic Choir, with over 100 musicians flying to Belfast especially for the occasion.
Tickets are certain to be snapped up quickly by fans of Morricone who will savour a mouth-watering selection of some of his most unforgettable music. His distinguished repertoire includes Once Upon a Time in America, Days of Heaven, The Untouchables, the intimate Cinema Paradiso and the enormously popular score for The Mission which starred Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons.
Ennio Morricone has won five BAFTAs for Best Score and been nominated five times for an Oscar. He finally received an Honorary Academy Award in 2007 "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music". He is only the second composer in Oscar history to be honoured with such an award.
http://www.waterfront.co.uk/whatson/performancedetails.aspx?id=39203
DJs of delight
Donal Dineen The Small Hours (midnight-2am Mon-Thu)
http://www.todayfm.com/sectional.asp?id=905
An Taobh Tuathail (11pm-1am Mon-Fri)
http://www.rte.ie/rnag/antaobhtuathail.html
Gilles Peterson Worldwide
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/gillespeterson
The JK Ensemble (2.30pm-4.30pm Mon-Fri)
http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/jk/
http://www.todayfm.com/sectional.asp?id=905
An Taobh Tuathail (11pm-1am Mon-Fri)
http://www.rte.ie/rnag/antaobhtuathail.html
Gilles Peterson Worldwide
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/gillespeterson
The JK Ensemble (2.30pm-4.30pm Mon-Fri)
http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/jk/
Thursday, 7 August 2008
I is another
The Orwell estate is to publish the great man's diaries from 9th August. You can check them out daily at: http://www.theorwellprize.co.uk/home.aspx
Ha Ha Ha
Congratulations to Declan & Caitriona and Scott and Sinead. I'm sure its put a big smile on your faces!
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