WATCHING STATUS QUO

The concert-goer does not expect irony at a Status Quo gig. However, despite the band's best efforts, singing

We're in the Army now

in a temporary venue on the site of a former British Army base at Ebrington Barracks in Derry Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West), as part of a year of events to mark the city's designation as the first UK City of Culture, brings them very close to the ironic.

Or perhaps not. After all, Status Quo is the status quo. And unnervingly fresh for it.

They rock out a straight up-and-down hits-show, with plenty of obligatory white-guy, phallic posturing with guitars; very loud and very good sound; a stunning, mandatory drum-solo and terrific lighting effects, delivering well-known material in a spritely, energised show the concert-goer enjoys.

Status Quo wear their colours on their sleeves. Or at least on their merchandising, where Union flags are often seen.

We're in the Army now.

Not everyone sings along. But the concert-goer notes that very many do. The crowd is hot and sweaty and in great form. The concert-goer meets loads of friends and acquaintances, one of whom claims his friends told him they were going to a John Prine concert. His friends just laugh.

A Status Quo concert is not a John Prine concert. The band is energetic and full-on. The songs are direct, simple and effective. The concert-goer hears no teenage angst. No singer-songwriter musing and mumbling. No hesitation or misgiving.

The status quo is clear and forceful.

And the concert-goer jigs and hops with everyone, as the hits roll out.

Status Quo is a juggernaut. An imperious rock and awe of sound and light.

Roll over lay down and let me in Roll over it's a long way where I've been Roll over lay down and let me in Roll over lay down

Status Quo blast into town as a cavalcade of lights, sound and energy, thumbing their noses at The Beatles' mawkish and witty lyrics.

Doing the garden, digging the weeds,


Who could ask for more?

The concert-goer recognises the power of their ageless appeal and wonders if Status Quo consider how their work speaks to and reinforces a connection between sex, maleness and militarisation in society.

The irony of members of a crowd, from a society tentatively coming out of civil conflict, singing

A vacation in a foreign land Uncle Sam does the best he can You're in the army now Oh, oh, you're in the army now

leaves the concert-goer unnerved, though sated overall.

As the status quo does.

Again again again again, again again again again Why don't you do it, why don't you do it again.......

http://www.statusquo.co.uk

http://www.songlyrics.com/the-beatles/when-i-m-sixty-four-lyrics/

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CONFEDERATIONS CUP OF DISCONTENT OVERFLOWS

It is as if all the unrest across the world has come to a head in one country, Brazil.

It is as if The Arab Spring, the upheavals in Greece, the bank crisis in Cyprus, the Occupy Movement in New York and elsewhere, the stresses and strain in Bahrain, the divisions in Turkey have all coalesced around a warm-up international football tournament.

All in time for the big one next year: The World Cup, the greatest corporate spectacle on the planet.

Albert Camus, Nobel Prize winner for Literature and goalkeeper for Algeria, once said

Everything I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.

And it is football, the glorious global game that provides the occasion.  The world's greatest spectacle seems to be one spectacle too far. The preliminary warm-up tournament, The Confederations Cup, becomes the focus for the massive public discontent in Brazil, a country trumpeted in The Financial Times and other journals as an economic miracle, where 'morality and obligations' are kicked into touch.

People have had enough of such miracles. Enough of the transfer of public money to private hands; enough of the myth of progress as a mask to cover corporate greed; enough of austerity, cuts and poor services; enough of division and separation; enough of the corralling of wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

Enough of heroes?

Reports come in of social media challenges to the great Pele, Brazil's heroic footballer, who linked blood and country in a call to citizens to stop protesting and to support the national team.

Another former Brazilian footballer, Romario, once commented that

Pele, when silent, is a poet.

Watch Pele (and Bobby Moore) beat the Nazis and win World War 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCJBXfKtOiM

How easy will it be for the citizens of Brazil to escape to victory?

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/wave-of-protests-continue-across-brazil-1.1435550

http://www.philosophyfootball.com/new_win.html

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G8? 'FARRAGO' SAYS JUDGE

District Judge Barney McElholm, sitting at Derry Magistrates Court in Derry Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West), in the trial of a man facing a number of drugs charges committed in May and August 2012, said he could not commit to a bail application on Monday because he was

involved in this other farrago.

farrago noun (farragos or farragoes) a confused mixture; a hotchpotch. 


Etymology: 17c: Latin, meaning 'mixed fodder'. 

The Chambers Dictionary; 12^th Edition; 2011

The farrago he referred to is the G8 Summit, set for a golf resort in County Fermanagh, near Enniskillen (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West) on Monday and following days.

People in Enniskillen today -

Bloomsday! What would James Joyce make of the Judge's farrago? -

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/video-ulysses-in-three-minutes-1.1428915

- for the Ulster Senior Gaelic Football Championship Quarter Final between Cavan and Fermanagh will find their travel plans disrupted by what the District Judge referred to as

a travelling Eurovision song contest, which has completely disrupted the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland.

Football fans sent on long detours, airport security heightened; schools closed, public examinations disrupted; farmers asked not to spread slurry because of the smell; a temporary morgue put in place; police officers and equipment flown in from Britain; temporary holding cells, the criminal justice system disrupted; business compromised, working patterns changed: no wonder the Judge, like many other people, wonders about the benefits of having the meeting in Fermanagh.

If it means

Putting everything else on the back burner. I hope its worth it.

As well as the content and networking involved in such a meeting, the fact of the meeting itself is a symbolic representation of the current social order. It is a manifestation of power on the ground. The intense, almost hysterical, preparations for the event indicate how out of kilter the social (dis) order is.

Aerial photographs of the venue for the G8 summit, a cluster of buildings on lawns beside a lake, situate it anywhere north of Spain in Europe and anywhere along a whole stretch of the North American coast. The photographs do not scream 'Fermanagh'.

The Judge reckons

It would be better held in the middle of the desert somewhere for all the good it does anybody.

One location for future meetings could be anywhere east of Nyala (12 degrees North, 24 degrees East), near the border between Sudan and Chad, in any of the refugee camps located in that region. The refugees probably have enough to deal with, without the Judge's farrago showing up, disrupting everything and leaving a mess behind.

Like a gang of rowdy teenage boys and their hangers-on, taking over a beach on a sunny day, bothering everybody else with their noise and their ostentatious, inflated language, before leaving stacks of cans, pizza boxes, bottles and other garbage behind, when they speed off in their souped-up vehicles.

Video-conferencing anybody?

Come on Fermanagh!

The Derry Journal: newspaper; Derry; 14^th June 2013

http://ulster.gaa.ie

http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e483b76.html

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TEENAGE KICKS AND MYTHS FOR ALL AGES

The punk band rocks on the back of the lorry. Then Zambian tumblers and English fire-eaters roll by.

Are teenage dreams so hard to beat?

A bevy of shirt-factory workers, in blue dungarees and head scarves, sashay along the road to a rhythm and blues beat. They carry radiant blue flax flowers. It is a parade and a pageant on a summer's evening.

Earlier, the punk band play to a sun-drenched crowd on a reclaimed gasometer site. A woman, aged 94, taps her foot. A woman, aged 70, jigs about and waves her hands high, in front of the stage. A man and a woman, almost 60, shake, bob, weave and shimmy.

Get teenage kicks right through the night.

At night-fall, a monster on a barge comes up the river, spewing flames and light. Fireworks blaze from the banks to repel it.

Spectacles of conflict are more stunning (produceable?) than spectacles of peace.

It is storied in the city that a foreign garrison took it over. A wolf, carrying a firebrand, entered the city from the surrounding forest and tossed the firebrand into the garrison's magazine and blew it up.

Fire works.

Soldiers from the garrison ran amok, crying out that a great god had delivered death upon them, in retribution for the deaths delivered by their deeds.

I need excitement and I need it bad. And it's the best I've ever had
.

A saint, in a curragh, is pitted against the monster on the barge. Ireland pitted against Scotland? Good against Evil?

Father do not allow thunder and lightning,

Lest we be shattered by its fear and its fire.

The monster transforms into three swans, echoing the Children of Lir story, in a feat of theatrical engineering on a grand scale. 

As simple as that?

Stories, old and post-modern. Undertones and overtones. Myths overlaying and reverberating.

Great pyrotechnics. Wonderful lights and sound. A choir sings uplifting choruses on The Peace Bridge, as the battle ceases. A rock song blasts marvellously from sound systems along the quayside where citizens throng, craning their necks, raising cameras, phones and ipads above their heads to capture images their eyes can't reach.

The boys are back in town.

It is a galvanising spectacle. Families and friends huddle close. Smile. Teenagers kick for joy. Babies grin. People stay close. 

Then go home.

Older ones know, from their experience, that war is not a spectacle. That it is a grim tragedy. Younger ones are wary, even as they kick in exultation.

I wanna hold you, wanna hold you tight.
Alright.

And the sun shines the next day.

It is the business of mythology proper, and the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy.

Even when the legend is of an actual historical personage, the deeds of victory are rendered not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figurations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H83nRM8wwM4

http://www.ccea.org.uk/colmcille/docs/epubs/english/the_founding_of_derry.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQo1HIcSVtg

The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Joseph Campbell; book; New World Library; California; 2008

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