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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ONE BIG WEEKEND GOES SPECTACULAR

BBC Radio 1 rolled its One Big Weekend festival into Derry Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West) as part of the UK City of Culture 2013 programme and went spectacular. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. Ellie Goulding sang 'Anything Could Happen'. And indeed it could. Ain't got no mother, ain't got no culture Ain't got no friends, ain't got no schooling Ain't got no love, ain't got no name Ain't got no ticket, ain't got no token It is the nature of big weekend festivals that the many more people who do not get tickets are disappointed. Some saw the acts perform in a live-streaming organised by local community groups well away from the festival site. Following the weekend, media reports are ecstatic. The event is hailed as a major success. The sight of young people – at least some of them - smiling and enjoying themselves – at least for a weekend – is hailed as a triumph. And it is. Can it be sustained? Can the resources poured into the city to bring off the weekend festival by the BBC, Derry City Council, Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), Search, Fire and Rescue bodies, ambulance and hospital services, stewarding organisations and many other dispensers of public money, be gathered and spent again in the city? Not likely. There were efforts made by shops, hotels and bars and others to capture some of the spare cash brought by the 40 000 people who attended, as well as the jet-setting stars and their crews, thus capitalising on the massive outlay of public funds. Is this the business model? The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply. Ain't got no home, ain't got no shoes Ain't got no money, ain't got no class Ain't got no skirts, ain't got no sweater Ain't got no perfume, ain't got no beer And where is the human in all of this? I got my heart, I got my soul I got my back, I got my sex I got my arms, I got my hands I got my fingers, Got my legs I got my feet, I got my toes I got my liver, Got my blood In the midst of the lonely crowd, small groups, living within – and enjoying - the spectacle, as all citizens do, are also considering moves to bypass it. They are drawn to make, not only to consume; to be, not only to have; to live, not only to exist. The end of the history of culture manifests itself in two opposing forms: the project of culture’s self-transcendence within total history, and its preservation as a dead object for spectacular contemplation. The first tendency has linked its fate to social critique. http://www.lyricsdepot.com/nina-simone/aint-got-no-i-got-life.html http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm http://www.cityofculture2013.com/2013/05/success-of-bbcs-radio-1-big-weekend/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqpNaAnYatE&feature=youtu.be www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

READING STRAW DOGS BY JOHN GRAY

Straw Dogs is the title of a Sam Peckinpah film and of a book by John Gray.

John Gray is professor of European Thought at The London School of Economics, London (51 degrees North, 0 degrees West). The reader observes, after finishing Straw Dogs, that John Gray doesn't think much of European thought.

Straw Dogs is a brisk, lively, yet curiously enervating read, a vivid swirl through philosophy, animal behaviour and popular culture.

Gray is a big fan of arch-pessimist Schopenhauer.

Like other animals, we are embodiments of universal Will, the struggling suffering energy that animates everything in the world.

Gray is good when quoting voraciously from, and commenting quirkily upon, the work of dead philosophers. He has a winning Sunday paper/colour supplement style, used to telling effect in snatches of writing that are robust and catchy. It is highly readable pop-philosophy at its best, especially when nailing the myth of perpetual progress.

The idea of progress is only the longing for immortality given a techno-futurist twist.

The technological pursuit of immortality is not a scientific project. It promises what religion has always promised – to give us freedom from fate and chance.

Gray is astutely accurate in his delineation of the cult of Christianity as the mid-point between Greek philosophy and the Enlightenment in the series of myths we use to make sense of the here and now and to make some sense of hope and possibility for the future.

After all, there's never been a kingdom given to so much bloodshed as that of Christ.

That's Montesquieu, isn't it?

Oh, really? Who's he?

Somebody well worth reading.

Gray has no time for moral philosophy. The section The Vices of Morality is the most trenchant in the book and he has a right go at Socrates.

We think of morality as set of laws or rules that everyone must obey, and as a special sort of value, which takes precedence over every other.

The reader senses that Gray is less secure when relying on his own invention and concludes that, after all the fireworks and the allusions, Gray is simply a downbeat Malthusian of the old school; every problem in the world is due to over-population and the only solution is the mass annihilation of many of Gray's fellows, which is likely anyway as we are homo rapiens and killing is what we are good at.

The reader notes that Gray does not offer himself, his family, friends and colleagues as members of the species to be taken out. Gray reserves that role for a generalised body referred to as 'the poor', who, as always in such works, are elsewhere, never in the world of the writer.

Images of the Sunday supplement magazine come to the reader's mind. There is a centre fold spread of aching text and stunning photos of the horrors of war, the devastations of famine or the trauma of an industrial catastrophe, such as in Dhaka (23 degrees North, 90 degrees East) recently.

And following this, there is the high-gloss photo of a luxury saloon car or a watch of improbable ostentation or even a grotesquely sleek and powerful racing yacht. The Sunday supplement tells us that believing the dreams of their advertisements is the way to confine the horrors of the world elsewhere. The choice is ours.

All the grand narratives get the Gray treatment and are dismissed: Western and Eastern philosophies (the Eastern ones, especially Chinese and Japanese, fare slightly better), the Homeric Greek ideas, the Socratic Greek ideas, Christianity, the Enlightenment, Marxism, Fascism and Stalinism.

Notably, the current dominant narrative - a globalised casino-capitalism – is not treated quite so forcefully. This surprises the reader given that Gray works in an academic institution which has as a motto rerum cognoscere causa (to know the cause of things). As ever, what you see depends on where you look from.

The reader plans to read Gray's first book: False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism and notes that it is not sufficient to base everything on contingency and a deterministic, cyclical, even downwardly spiralling, fate, drawing us to destruction.

We are contingent, rapacious, social animals, with choices, if not purposes and aims.

The reader is left wanting more than Gray's concluding note.

Can we think of the aim of life as being simply to see?

What you see depends on where you stand. Gray's vantage is metropolitan, academic and wealthy.

His book is stirring, readable and the epitome of I'm-alright-jackery.

Straw Dogs: book; John Gray; Granta Books: London; 2002

Straw Dogs: film; Sam Peckinpah; ABC Pictures; Los Angeles; 1971

http://www.aljazeera.com/video/europe/2013/04/2013426165011175259.html

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SHAKESPEARE MORALS DISPUTES TODAY

Christian church leaders in Ireland and Britain call for broad moral discussions in the face of public efforts to change laws and practices on marriage, abortion, the role of women clergy, prostitution and the sex trade.

Come, you are too severe a moraler: as the time, the place, and the condition of this country 
stands, I could heartily wish this had not befallen; 
but, since it is as it is, mend it for your own good.

Mending it for our own good is complex in the midst of calls from quarters embroiled in sexual, financial and other difficulties and scandals.

When I did hear 


The motley fool thus moral on the time, 


My lungs began to crow like chanticleer 


That fools should be so deep contemplative;

It is past time for church leaders to humbly and morally reflect on the churches' relationships with investment banks and arms manufacturers; to cogently acknowledge that best practice in child protection was not always present and is not currently assured to public satisfaction; that the understanding of marriage today is changing as it has done over the centuries; that it is possible to be pro-life, while accepting the right of women to choose to be pregnant or not; that controlling conception is a contemporary, human right;

and yet, to say 
the truth, I had as lief have the foppery of freedom 
as the morality of imprisonment.

And that being moral is a human creation, one that is continually contested and re-invented in the cauldron of our lives day-to-day.

Fortune is an excellent moral.

Being moral is a cultural and evolutionary form available to all humans.

Applying this to that, and so to so; 
For love can comment upon every woe.

http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org

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