June, 2008

television — No Comments
30
Jun 08

We demand an investigation

My admiration for the Littlest Hobo knows no bounds, particularly his ability to trick simpletons into assisting him in whatever insane scheme he has in mind that week.

However I cannot stand idly by as new information comes to light:

In the [Littlest Hobo] movie, the dog was tethered to a lamb for most of the story.

That lamb was found dead in a hotel room at the age of 6; it was ruled death by misadventure. The Littlest Hobo now denies that he was the dog in the original film and has never visited that hotel. Suspicious? YOU DECIDE.

Also: the Littlest Hobo theme song in Spanish demonstrates that the Hispanic invasion of the USA is spearheaded by canines not wetbacks. I will write to Pat Buchanan immediately.

YouTube Preview Image

Slow news week? You betcha – I’m laying wooden floors in a shop!

music — 5 Comments
25
Jun 08

Festival Weather

Montenegro lacks anything resembling a live music scene, and I was suffering serious withdrawal symptons as a result of spending too long up a hillside with only the livestock for company. On the other hand, when you’re surrounded by cows, the one thing you don’t need is more cowbell. So I went to Zagreb for the VIP InMusic Festival, arriving just in time to catch the first day’s acts.

I also arrived just in time for the weather to turn festival, with a thunderstorm that turned Jarun into a mud pit in about 5 minutes flat and delayed all the performances. Musicians are feeble – if they’re worried about electrocution, they should just wear rubber shoes. Electrifying performances! Oh, I do make myself laugh. There were plenty of Croatian acts, but I didn’t drive for half a day to see them – so I apologise to my one Croatian reader. Everybody I saw was great (I have good taste in music, anybody can tell you) but some were greater than others. In ascending order, but I wouldn’t click on any of the links below unless you really, really love Flash animation and MySpace.

9. Sons & Daughters. I knew nothing about them when I arrived, and I still don’t. Scotrock, good stuff, not much barnstorming, they probably featured on the cover of NME at some point.

8. Amadou & Mariam. Disappointing – even A&M’s inherently sunny dispositions couldn’t dispel the rain this early on. The music was fine, but there was no energy on stage – it was like watching a really high resolution DVD that consists of a static shot for an entire hour.

7. The Prodigy. If you’ve seen them once, you’ve seen them. I’ve seen them more than once, so I’ve definitely seen them. Nothing much has changed for the Prodigy since about 1996, but why should it?

6. Nick Cave. I admit to being fully mystified by the deification of Nick Cave. I was pleased that his onstage persona is nothing like his recorded persona – he talked with the audience between every song, and there were jokes, too. Imagine! His songs feel too much like cock rock in goth drag, but I can see why people like him. (Iza tells me that she loves the way he moves his body – I can’t see it myself.)

5. The Go! Team. If pogo was an Olympic sport, the Go! Team would be the UK representatives.

4. Seun Kuti and Egypt 80. The worst thing that you can say about Seun Kuti is that he isn’t his dad, but neither am I, so I can’t really hold that against him. The Afrobeat revival has taken everybody by surprise (including me, who insisted on playing Fela Kuti to drunk rugby players at Birmingham University at great personal risk) and while Seun is always going to be one step behind older brother Femi, for some reason I prefer Seun.

3. Hot Chip. Okay, I’ll admit – this surprised me as well. Hot Chip? Aren’t they just Kraftwerk wearing a pair of plastic breasts who’ve watched Stop Making Sense too many times? Well, maybe – but they also ripped up the soundsystem on the main stage and gave a walloping performance despite the rain. It’s just a bunch of guys tapping on various mini-synths and electronic doodads while one of them sings nerdy love songs over the top, but somehow it works. Perhaps I was suffering from undiagnosed electropop withdrawal, but they’ll be pleased to hear that I’d pay money to see them again.

2. Tinariwen. The reason why I came to this festival in the first place. I’ve missed seeing Tinariwen about three times in different countries, and I was determined to see them this time around. Their whole desert blues shtick isn’t as fresh as it was when they first appeared, but it still sounds more elemental than pretty much everything else going. You get more for your money as well – at least eight people on stage at all times, and if somebody isn’t a-singing or a-playing, they’ll be a-dancing. Surprisingly there was a huge and appreciative crowd for them – who knew that the Tuareg freedom struggle would play so well in Croatia?

1. Dreadzone. I didn’t even know that Dreadzone were still around – I thought they’d died in a terrible dubplate accident in the mid-1990s. I remember buying their first album and thinking it was pretty average, but clearly I didn’t know what I was talking about back then. Watching MC Spee do robotics on crutches while the soundboard mashed up Chase the Devil and the band gave shouts out to South London was priceless. Hands-down the best set of the festival, which makes it the best gig I’ve been to in the last year.

wordsperminute — Comments Off
24
Jun 08

Words per minute #3: Keynes on Ideas

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

- J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

politics — 1 Comment
23
Jun 08

My nose, my face, my country

Many Balkan politicians have very firm principles. They’re prepared to make great sacrifices for those principles, but they’re more often prepared to sacrifice other people for them. People don’t seem to have as much of a problem with this as you’d expect – look at how many Serbs continued to follow Milosevic as he lead the country into utter ruin. It’s to the credit of the Serbian people that eventually they pulled themselves out of that collective descent, but the tendency remains firmly embedded in Balkan politics.

For a contemporary example, look no further than the report on Serbblog on the possibility that Montenegro might recognise Kosovo. Now this is something that’s unlikely in the extreme but which makes great political hay for pro-Serbian politicians in Montenegro – Andrija Mandic captured 19% of the vote in the recent elections by playing up to it. Mandic recently made a visit to Kosovo and has clearly decided that this is the issue that’s going to get him the most mileage:

Mandic suggested that ordinary Montenegrins take to the streets in protest, especially now during tourist season (tourism represents nearly 25% of the Montenegrin economy) should the Montenegrin leadership even consider such a traitorous move.

Apparently the Montenegrin government needs to be prevented from even thinking about recognising Kosovo (thoughtcrime!) and the best way to do that is to cripple the one part of the economy that’s actually growing. The fact that, if successful, the short-term impact of such a strike would damage the average Montenegrin more than anybody else, and that the long-term impact would probably kill the tourist industry in the cradle, seems to have escaped Mandic (and Serbblog, who supports the idea). Or maybe it hasn’t escaped him, and he genuinely believes that cutting your nose off to spite your face is a sensible policy position?

UPDATE: Okay, now Djukanovic has said in public that recognition of Kosovo independence is inevitable. Strike, Andrija, strike! (Of course, this is from New Kosova Report, and Djukanovic apparently specifically used the passive voice, and didn’t actually say that Montenegro is going to recognise Kosovo any time soon, etc, etc. Mileage may vary.)

life / style — No Comments
23
Jun 08

My head is too small

Life would probably be much improved if we were all Super Deformed.

politics / war — No Comments
18
Jun 08

Prancing Interventionists

Norm Geras is smarter than me, but sometimes smart people can be just plain silly.

Opposing the war Hall, like the rest of the many Iraq-war smugwits in the camp of those who opposed the war, favoured the continuation, sine die, of a regime of torture and murder.

It is a truism, of course, that many (although not all) of the pro-war camp were surprising muted in their opposition to Saddam Hussein while he was busy committing genocide against the Kurds, and for an extremely long time thereafter. Presumably this means that at that point they also favoured the continuation of a regime of torture and murder – perhaps Norm could tell us what changed their minds?

Meanwhile Oliver Kamm descends into self-parody, proclaiming “Bush made the world a safer place”. Witness:

The most fundamental decision in western security policy in the past seven years… has been the recognition that the most voluble adversaries of western society… are a reactionary, millenarian and atavistic force with whom accommodation is impossible as well as intensely undesirable.

Back in the real world, Israel and Hamas agree a ceasefire pending negotiations on re-opening the Rafah border crossing. It is noticeable that those who decry the slightest hint of jaw-jaw and bray most loudly for war-war are frequently those who are unlikely to ever suffer the consequences of war-war. The result is that, while Israel desperately but understandably seeks accommodation with its opponents, professional satirists such as Kamm are busy apparently telling them that they shouldn’t – for their own sake.

Those readers unfamiliar with this brand of satire may require some help understanding passages like this:

For all Bush’s verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.

“Verbal infelicity” = lying. “Diplomatic brusqueness” = war of aggression. “Negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq” = completely dropping the ball at the most critical point. “Insouciance regarding standards of due process” = heavily editing the Geneva Conventions and sanctioning torture. “The world is a safer place” = pretty much as it sounds, unless you’re an Iraqi citizen.

I’m under no illusions that my opinion counts for anything with either Norm or Oliver, but I truly wish that the pro-war camp would just face their truth. Iraq has been a terrifying mess since the beginning (although the results of the surge have been a welcome relief in terms of the human cost) and pretending otherwise is just a fool’s penny in the fountain. Opposing that war – and wars to come – doesn’t make you an apologist for genocide; it can simply mean that you’ve seen how these games tend to play out on the ground.

funny? — 1 Comment
17
Jun 08

A joke goes wrong in three parts

A seahorse walks into a bar.

Part 1

“Why the long face?” asks the barman.

“Don’t be a twat,” replies the seahorse.

Part 2

“How did you walk into the bar? You’re aquatic,” says the barman.

“I’ll f*cking show you aquatic,” shouts the seahorse, and stabs him.

Part 3

“Let’s go over this one more time. Why did you stab him?” asks the policeman.

“I’m not saying anything else until my lawyer gets here,” states the seahorse.

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