The Quiet Road

Sad news.

I found out via Justin who has another great clip. Check it out after watching this one.

Bugger. Prince has cancelled Monday’s gig in Dublin. Bit of an arse really, but what can you do?

The question now becomes; do I go see Iggy and the Stooges on Monday night instead? I’ve got Leonard Cohen on Sunday and Christy Moore the following Thursday, so it’s not like there’s a shortage of good gigs to be getting on with. But at the same time, I was getting a kick out of the whole “three living legends in five days” thing I had going on for next week. I won’t make it to Glastonbury this year, so I kind of had next week set aside as my “take the foot off the pedal ever so slightly and chill out a bit” week for the summer. Which I’ll still be doing of course; Prince or no Prince; but it leaves a bit of a gap in the week and while Iggy’s no Prince, he definitely falls into the Living Legends category.

Hmmm. Let me think about it.

UPDATE: Just got a text message from a friend wondering whether or not I wanted a ticket for Iggy on Monday night. Isn’t that nice?

Apologies for neglecting this place, but the past few weeks have been pretty hectic. Right now I’ve got a bit of time to myself, though, so I figured I’d pop in and blow some of the web dust off the page lest it settle too deep and I start slipping into the “taking a break” section of that small handful of blogrolls discerning enough to carry me.

I do have a whole bunch of incomplete blogposts from the past couple of weeks. But I can’t seem to properly finish a thought at the moment. I suspect that’s got something to do with being neck-deep in research. Everything seems to return to the same topic.

So my observations on the Lisbon referendum campaign ended up being an analysis of the unconscious drives at work within the collective psyche of the electorate. My short piece about our New Glorious Leader, Brian (I’m not just ‘an Irish Gordon Brown’) Cowen began by explaining why actually, he’s not just an Irish Gordon Brown, and ended up examining the unconscious drives within the capitalist collective psyche. And my oil prices / peak oil / fuel protests piece? Well, let’s just acknowledge that there’s a pattern emerging and the phrases “unconscious drives” and “collective psyche” made an appearance. I also ended up explaining my belief that if you were to actually sit down and design a system to drive a culture completely psychotic, then you’d have a hard job coming up with something better than a free market in natural resources.

All of which may well be fascinating, but it’s also very dense stuff at the moment. Blog posts that require extensive glossaries are probably to be avoided. It’s all still percolating you see, and hasn’t yet really coalesced into something easy to communicate. All being well, for me the next couple of months will essentially be devoted to that very process.

Reading a lot of Gregory Bateson really changes the way you think about… well, everything. And that’s not hyperbole. It’s just how it is. And it’s worth pointing out that he’s not shy about making it clear that his intention is just that. On top of that, it’s long been recognised that reading a lot of Freud will seriously affect the way you think about… again, pretty much everything.

So there’s probably a certain inevitability in the fact that while researching a paper that hovers somewhere between a Freudian reading of Bateson and a Batesonian reading of Freud, there’s a tendency to view every issue through a psychodynamic prism.* Which is probably a very good thing from the point of view of writing the paper, but is less good when it comes to blog posts. It’s also a bit hit-and-miss when it comes to everyday human interaction… I’m trying to curtail the constant tendency to punctuate conversations with: “hmmmm, that’s a lot like Bion’s idea of the emotional storm created by interpersonal awareness really… I must write that down… … … … sorry, what were you saying?” That, and looking at people as though they’re mad because they don’t know who Isabel Menzies Lyth is**. Really need to cut that out.

What’s that, you say? The title? Well, my thesis supervisor stressed the importance of getting it down to ten words, but in the end I just couldn’t compress / focus it any further than twelve. So without futher ado… “Free Markets as Collective Pleasure Principle: Psychodynamics of an Ecology of Mind”.

What do you think? Sound academic enough? Personally I think it sounds academic as fuck.

It’s certainly a densely packed dozen words. Start unpacking them, and before you know where you are, there’s fourteen thousand of the buggers lying around looking to be put into some kind of meaningful pattern. It’s a dirty job………

Aaanyways, if you’re in the vicinity of the Trinity Postgrad Reading Room over the summer, pop in and say hello. You know where I’ll be.

It’s the 14th of February, and as we all know, that means it’s the feast of St. Cyril.

Saint Cyril was born in Northern Greece, but took it upon himself to bring The Good Word to Eastern Europe and — along with his brother, Saint Methodius — is responsible for converting the Slavs. Saint Cyril also invented the alphabet that still bears his name (Saint Script, or as it’s sometimes known; Sanskrit) and used it to translate the gospels into Slavonic. The feast of St. Methodius is also celebrated today, as is the feast of St. Maro, founder of the Maronites and the first person to work out that food left to steep in a sauce overnight tastes much better when barbecued.

Interestingly, today is also the feast of St. Apollonius of Terni (the patron saint of purple rain), the feast of St. Ammonio of Alexandria (the patron saint of noxious fumes), the feast of St. Zeno of Rome (patron saint of logical paradoxes), and of course, it’s also the feast of St. Proto (patron of scale models and stuff that still needs testing).

I think that covers them all. Any suggestion that I may have missed someone will be met with a firm, but fair…

Just a quickie. I’d like to assure anyone who may have received some junk email over the past 24 hours claiming to be from a numero57.net email address, that it has nothing to do with me. I’ve just received a large number of ‘bounced’ messages (the subject line was “JANUARY 75% OFF”) and a cursory glance would suggest that they were sent from ‘web’ at ‘numero57.net’.

However, this is misleading. A closer examination of the header details of the spam emails reveals that they actually originate from an ‘telecomitalia.it’ address, but the “from” address has been spoofed to read mine.

To the best of my knowledge, there’s really not much I can do about this, folks. I’m sorry that you’re getting spammed, but I simply can’t prevent an anonymous stranger (possibly in Italy, though even that’s probably a zombie machine) from typing my address into the “from” field of his software.

Goddamn spammers!

I’ve just deactivated my Facebook account. To be honest, I’m surprised it took me so long. Within days of signing up to the site, I’d set my junkmail filter to treat it as a spammer. Not an auspicious beginning. Somebody’s vampire attacked somebody else’s lieutenant zombie. And did I want to help in a fight between some people? Apparently I had a free “atomic punch” to offer. For a dollar I could send some bad clip-art to someone.

But the death knell was sounded late last year when I received an email from my new friend, Bono. Sending mass emails isn’t Bono’s style. At least that’s what the first line of his mass email said. But he was just so excited about his new song that he had to tell all his “friends”. I was his friend, you see. I’d used some facebook music-tracking widget, and then I’d played some U2. This made me Bono’s friend. Well, it made me his friend insofar as he treats his friends to mass emails about his new records. Something tells me our friendship doesn’t extend much beyond a marketer/marketed-at relationship. I probably can’t count on Bono if I need someone to help carry boxes next time I move house, for instance.

Anyways, I turned off all the various notifications and asked the site to stop emailing me. I disabled all the widgets and I upped the privacy settings. But then I found myself worried in case people were actually trying to contact me (about something other than facebook widgetry) and I’d be effectively ignoring them as I was automatically junking messages from the site.

By chance I intercepted an email from facebook before it got shredded as junk last night. It would have been a shame to have missed it. But I just can’t be dealing with the volume of complete nonsense generated by that site. It struck me that I’d much rather such messages didn’t get sent, than got sent and ignored. So I deactivated my account with immediate effect. My atomic punch forever unused.

Get Your War On. The first and the last are classics. The ones in between are merely excellent. Link via the Chicken Backup.

Culture Club. David Byrne muses on the nature of culture. Half unanswered questions, half insightful commentary. I like his style.

Also from David Byrne, his Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars from Wired magazine.

“We’re living in a civilisation in decline.”
– You really think so?
“I do.”
– So when did it begin… this decline? When did we peak, as it were?
“1909.”
– Whoa! Really?
“Yep. That was the peak of European civilisation. Western civilisation if you want.”
– Wow. That long ago? For some reason I thought you were going to say 1969 and Neil Armstrong… y’know, how we gave up looking outwards after that and started retreating from the frontiers instead of pushing at them? But I guess I was thinking more about American civilisation than European…
“American civilisation? There’s no such thing. European civilisation became globalised… geographically detached. By 1909 the civilisation that emerged from the European Dark Ages had spread to every corner of the planet. It was at its height. After that… well… the rush towards World War One began. And so the decline began. Modern America is — in many ways — merely the final stage of that decline.”
– I know a couple of hundred million Americans who would probably disagree with you there…
“Well, wouldn’t be the first time a couple of hundred million Americans have been wrong, now would it?”
– Ooooh, bitchy. They told me you were anti-American. I assumed they just meant anti-Bush…
“Politically anti-American. Politically. America is the overheating engine of latter-day globalised capitalism… you could say I’m ‘anti’ the role it plays and has played in the acceleration of our decline into barbarism. And that’s something that goes far deeper than which middle-aged rich guy is currently sitting in the White House.”
– What are you saying? That all Americans are the problem?
“Of course I’m not saying that. Mind you, it’s hard not to make a wise-crack about how getting the government you deserve. If it really is ‘Of The People’, then presumably the people need to accept responsibility for its actions.”
– Oh come on! You know it’s a little more complicated than that.
“Is it? I dunno… yeah, maybe you’re right.”
– No ‘maybe’ about it. Take me for example… I’ve spent my whole adult life campaigning for complete nuclear disarmament. But when it comes to choosing the leader of the country, I’ve never once been able to vote for someone who shares my position. Not once.
“No you’re right of course, I agree with you. I was deliberately winding you up.”
– 1909 though? I really didn’t expect that.

I’ve been admitted to the M.Phil course at Trinity and will be starting in a week or so. My first lecture is — I think — Tuesday 9th October, and will be on “Existentialism and psychoanalysis”. It appears that my disastrous interview didn’t sink me after all.

This is good news.

“I’m in a bit of turmoil at the moment.”
– Turmoil?
“Yeah… teetering on the edge of full-blown despair, in fact.”
– Hmmm. Nasty place to be teetering. I’ll bet it’s that bloody peak oil again, isn’t it?
“No. Well, not really. It’s more general than that. I’ve been thinking about some of the challenges we face in order to ensure that the future isn’t an extremely unpleasant place for us and our children to live…”
– Sorry, I’ve got to butt in there.
“Why? What did I say?”
– Just that the future might be an unpleasant place to live. The future isn’t a place; it’s a time. And even if you want to get all metaphorical about it, who was it pointed out that we don’t just ‘arrive’ at the future, we ‘build’ it?
“Tim Leary, I think”.
– Well there you go then. Nobody does metaphor like acid-heads.
“Actually, that’s a big part of the problem.”
– What? The ability of LSD to provide a metaphorical perspective to things?
“No! And stop trying to deliberately derail me. It’s the very fact that the future will indeed be a product of modern man. I’m just not sure I trust us to do a good job. In fact, worse than that, I’m starting to think our hands are tied. That the foundations have already been laid, and the job’s a bad one.”
– Jeez, I’m sorry I brought up the building metaphor now.
“Fair enough. To be honest, I usually use the ‘bus heading over the cliff’ image.”
– Ah, but of course. It’s a classic.
“Indeed. Here’s my thing though… I’m starting to get the feeling that when it comes to those big challenges; resource depletion, climate change, biodiversity collapse; that the bus is already in the air. We haven’t hit the ground yet, but attempting to slam on the brakes has become a singularly pointless exercise. May as well convince all the passengers to flap their arms for all the good it’ll do.”
– So what are you saying? We should keep taking those 99cent flights to Las Palmas while we can? Seriously man, if you tell me I’m in that bus waiting to hit the ground, then I’m going to party hard with the few minutes left to me.
“Well, it’s entirely up to you. I’d be lying if I said I honestly believed it’d have a measurable impact should you decide never to fly again. Peak oil is going to stop all that within fifteen years anyway. All of these airport expansions and all that airline investment; it’s the last gasp of a dying industry. And a shocking waste of time, energy and resources given their limited lifespan.”
– So that’s a yes? Let’s all party? I can hardly believe it.
“That’s not what I said and you know it. If we go back to the bus metaphor: We in the industrialised nations all bought our tickets on that bus. And the tickets came with complementary booze and strippers. But we also rounded up most of Africa and large chunks of Asia and stuck them in a badly-ventilated box and tied it to the back of the bus. I guess I just don’t have the stomach for partying when I think about that. But hey, you should enjoy yourself.”
– Miserable bastid.