A classic showdown – me against Arthur. I’m ahead on points but he appears to be ahead on pints.
March 28, 2008
March 27, 2008
March 26, 2008
Doctor Benway Consulting
You never know the day or the hour…so there are still copies of Going Postal mouldering away in files of “Best Bits” in people’s attics. I always thought of it as being utterly disposable, a folded sheet of A4 distributed anonymously in small piles on the counters of record shops and video rental places. The name was neither original nor apt – I don’t think a single copy was posted anywhere, to anyone. It was just a chance to rage, a kitchen-sink broadside, two Hunter Thompson fans living out gonzo fantasies on coffee and hash. He provided the rage and the ideas, and I tried to translate from spleen into English. The DMC Championships piece that Paul mentions was our purest collaboration, and the best thing to appear in GP. It’s amazing to hear that people outside of Dublin were reprinting it off their own bat. It was also the last issue – I don’t remember why; fecklessness, probably. We should have kept going. The gombeen commercialism of that mid-90s dance scene is replicated on grotesque scale across Irish society in the 2000s. Nobody is supposed to utter a word of complaint against boomtown Dublin – sure, aren’t we all better off now? Oh, we are, but some of us are much better off than others. The economic windfall of the last decade has been squandered for the benefit of a few, and the looming recession promises the edifying sight of the man behind the curtain pulling the same old levers on a machine that is still running on patchwork parts from the ’80s.
March 25, 2008
March 21, 2008
10 Recommended Recordings
As an aide-memoire, Alex Ross’ ten recommended recordings, from The Rest Is Noise. I will update with links as I track them down.
Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, Pieces For Orchestra, Levine/Berlin Philharmonic (DG/Arkivmusic.com)
Stravinsky, Rite Of Spring & Petrushka, Stravinsky/Columbia Symphony (Sony)
Bartok, Concerto For Orchestra & Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Reiner/Chicago Symphony (RCA)
Sibelius, Symphonies 4-7, Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic (DG)
Britten, Peter Grimes, Davis/Royal Opera House (Philips)
Copland The Populist, Tilson-Thomas/San Francisco Symphony (RCA)
Shostakovich, Symphonies 5 & 9, Bernstein/New York Philharmonic (Sony)
Messaien, Quartet For The End Of Time, Tashi (RCA)
Ligeti, Atmospheres & Lontano, Nott/Berlin Philharmonic (Teldec)
Reich, Music For 18 Musicians, (ECM)
March 19, 2008
It Is Marvellous
It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.
An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.
- Elizabeth Bishop
March 14, 2008
Further Reasons Heathrow Must Be Destroyed
I arrived into Heathrow from Bangkok around 8:30 to discover that, entirely predictably, my flight to Dublin had been delayed until 11. In keeping with the general policy of refusing to tell you anything you might need to know, the gate announcement was set for 10:20. I settled down for a quiet pint, weathering the manifest displeasure of the bar staff who evidently had better places to be on a Friday night. But then, so did I. Eventually the bar closed, leaving me with nothing to do but sit and watch the minutes tick away on the departures screen. A handful of other passengers joined me. At 10:30 the gate still hadn’t been called but I knew it had to be one of the ten gates that all flights to Ireland leave from so I decided to start walking that way.
Only to find that the doors to the gates were locked, with no sign of life visible through the glass. After ten minutes’ increasingly agitated searching (i.e. at 10:45, fifteen minutes to departure) we managed to find a lone security person lurking in a darkened office.
“The people who do the biometrics finish up at ten so we close the gates then.” she explained. “We made an announcement that all passengers on domestic flights should go to their gates at the time.”
“Ireland is NOT domestic!” we shot back, with varying degrees of nationalistic fervour.
“We consider it to be domestic.” she replied.
