We've been to Church (Sign Generator.com)

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now

From today's Guardian, an article by Donald Macleod on an academic conference in Manchester on The Smiths.

Talk about flogging a dead horse. Still, it could have been worse: They could have chosen the legacy of the Stone Roses.

(shudder)

Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals

Or so they said in 1968. Following on from the Miasnikov article below, Class Against Class has the entire text of Marshall Shatz's biography of Machajski here. It is titled Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic of The Russian Intelligensia and Socialism. Decades before the idea of co-optation was used by the Situationists, Machajski had spotted the opportunities for parasitism that hierarchical organization offers the middle classes and intelligentsia. One of the reasons why a genuinely progressive movement has to be non-hierarchical from day one if we are to be sure it will hold no attraction to those who would usurp its power.

Miasnikov and the Workers' Group

Obscure and rather old, but still worth checking out is this article by Paul Avrich from a 1984 issue of The Russian Review entitled "Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G. T. Miasnikov and the Workers' Group."

The Crisis in Irish Education

Exemplified by the following.

Me (during game of Trivial Pursuit with the in-laws yesterday): "Which Muslim leader did Abu Bakr succeed in 632 A.D.?"

Niece studying Medicine at the College of Surgeons: "Moses."

Later the same game.

Me: What are taurophobic matadors afraid of?

Same niece: "Mats . . . No, Tories."

No alcohol had been imbibed at this point.

Not for the Squeamish

And it happened right in front of my brother.

You'll be pleased to hear that since this awful event, Altrincham have started winning again.

Not sure what the moral of that is.

What I Read on My Holidays #2

Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed, by B. C. Hutchens.

Still Perplexed.

Reliable Technology Comes to Counago and Spaves

he wrote optimistically. Inspired by the good works of Darren and Reidski and especially Alphonse, I finally got round to downloading and installing Picasa, so that we can add visual colour and flair to their literary counterparts at C&S (he wrote even more optimistically). The test photo below originally appeared twice, thanks to my early enthusiasm, but I've fixed it now; not that you can have too much of a good thing.

Better half with unknown blogger

He is Risen! (almost)

Some good news from Club Mekon about Edwyn Collins:

Edwyn appears to have survived the brain haemorrhages he suffered and is making a slow recovery.

Message from his wife and son on his website:

"Dearest All, Thank you for all the continuing messages. I read them all and draw strength from every heartfelt thought. He's such an unsentimental person in every day life I wonder how he will react when he realises what you have all done for him. Meanwhile his progress continues. He breathes for himself, he's eating real food again (as of today), he's communicating and battling for returning mobility. I have complete faith in him. Today is our best day yet. Thanks for everything, Love Grace and William (who is, by the way, a hero.)

If you wish, you can send cards to him at: West Heath Studios, West Heath Yard, 174 Mill Lane, London, NW6 1TB."

Still Crazy After All These Years

Chess weirdo Bobby Fischer has been released from prison in Japan and has flown/fled to Iceland, which has granted him citizenship, side-stepping Japan's insistence that he be deported to the United States.

Says Fischer: "This was not an arrest. This was a kidnapping. This was all cooked up by Bush and Koizumi. They are all war criminals. They should be hung."

Woah! Hold your horses there, Bobby. Not before you hang the creators of this.

The Price of Catholic in-laws

. . . is that I have to spend easter away from the keyboard as I do the North-West Passage (i.e. Monaghan, Fermanagh, Cavan). Still, we've posted plenty for your delectation here at C&S over the past week. Re-read, ponder, savour, ignore—do what you will.

And the upside to Catholic in-laws, of course, is that I don't have to see them in the next life.

Have a happy atheist easter.

Football and Anarchy (what a beautiful thought)

The March issue of Futbolista magazine (it was either that or German GQ at the airport) features a number of articles that those of us more used to 4-4-2 and When Saturday Comes might find bemusing. I was particularly at a loss to understand their infatuation with Wayne Rooney, described as "El Pele del Liverpool" (not even a qualifying question mark here), but maybe they anticipate a move to Spain for him in the near future so that he can play for a team that wins something.

Equally unlikely was this article, "La anarquía táctica, ¿estilo o desorden?" I shall defer to my co-bloggers for an accurate translation, but you get the idea. Anarchy as a tactical approach to footie. Not a million miles away from Total Football, in fact, insofar as you allow a team of players proficient in all positions to roam pretty much at will and improvise dead-ball situations according to circumstance rather than require rigid adherence to a system that, by virtue of its rigidity, becomes susceptible to predictability. My Spanish isn't up to translating the rest of it. I'm sure others can do a better job.

The issue also features an interview with the lovable Deco (lovable since he came to Barça, I mean, and when he isn't playing against England or Ireland). In it, he's described as "El Rooney del Barça."

Is he bollocks.

That's Entertainment! (Weekly)

From the February 21 issue of Entertainment Weekly, the TV Times of U.S. media:

Look Out, Franz

Considering the original Gang of Four parted ways more than 20 years ago, it's remarkable their bracing brand of angular punk-funk can be heard everywhere today. Just listen to Franz Ferdinand, Radio 4, and a host of other indie darlings taking their cues from the U.K. legends.

"We discovered through the media that these new bands are borrowing from us, but they're all rather conservative," says Gang of Four bassist Dave Allen. So he and singer Jon King, guitarist Andy Gill, and drummer Hugo Burnham reunited for a short U.K. tour last month, and an upcoming U.S. stint that includes a set at Coachella on May 1—in part to put the upstarts in their place. "None of the bands that name-check us can do anything like this," says Allen, backstage, referring to a frenetic Jan. 28 gig they had just finished in London. "They can open for us, and if they do a better job, we'll throw in the towel."

That's unlikely. Even now, in their late 40s, they perform with the same ferocity that's earned them fans like Flea and Michael Stipe. In their late-'70s, early-'80s heyday, as punk rock and Thatcherism took hold in England, they spat out concise salvos against capitalism's corruption of culture and personal relationships. Their lyrics borrowed from Marxist theory, but they were cheeky enough to call their 1979 debut album Entertainment! (it's being reissued on May 17 by Warner Music).

How does revisiting their radical past square with their more capitalist day jobs? King currently runs a video production company, Allen is a marketing consultant who counts Intel as a client, Burnham is an art professor, and Gill is a music producer (Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Futureheads, the Jesus Lizard). "Everything I've done I'm very proud of," says Allen, unapologetically. "The world loves us. I don't see any collision."

-Robert Levine

Franco Finally Falls

In Spain there has been a lot of talk lately about the decision to remove some statues of General Franco. Here's the latest news in English and Spanish.
While many of us are shocked at the fact that they were still standing, some Spanish media and political figures related to Aznar’s Popular Party have stated their protest about what they call “stirring the past”. Apparently they would have preferred to leave Franco where he was, because the decision to remove him is opening old wounds, according to them.
The freakiest episode of all this was that of the elderly woman who paid a boy 3 euros to write a graffiti supporting the dictator. Surely the boy didn’t even know who the hell Franco was, and frankly he sold himself very cheap.

How Low Can You Go?

Before anyone asks, there are some things I would never do for money. This is one of them.

From the March issue of Golf Magazine:


Team Frank:

Billionaire drink baron Sidney Frank loves golf so much, he pays others to play for him.

Like many golf lovers, he rises daily at dawn, stumbles out of bed and treks to the course. But Sidney Frank, 85, doesn't bring his clubs. Once a 6-handicap, the liquor magnate and former owner of Grey Goose vodka confesses that he quit "when my wife started outdriving me." Yet six days a week he holds court in his cart, eating organic plums and directing his squad of three-to-five hired golf guns, who each earn more than $100,000 annually to play for Frank's amusement. It's good to be a billionaire.

Frank founded his real-life fantasy team in 1994 at Rancho Santa Fe Farms Golf Club near San Diego, one of his eight private clubs. "Sidney came down the stairs and asked if there were any young pros interested in traveling the world and playing golf," says Rick Zeiller, 32, a marketing VP at Sidney Frank Importing and, at the time, an assistant pro at the club. "I raised my hand. Before I knew it, I'd quit school, broke up with my girlfriend and was playing every day."

Nice work if you can get it, though sleeping in isn't an option. During warmer months, they meet daily before first light in Westchester County, New York, at Frank's Spanish ranch home. After breakfast they take his black, bulletproof Maybach to, say, Trump National or, come winter, a club in the San Diego area. The group plays serious golf while their commander coaches, referees and calls the play-by-play. Like any good boss, he rewards good performance, and is always ready to peel bills from a large wad of cash: $100 for eagles, $500 for the day's low score, $1,000 for a course record.

Before joining Frank's team, his guys were club pros, college coaches or hopefuls scraping by in golf’s minor leagues. "As a teaching pro, I rarely got to play," says Jeff Fujimoto, 31, who came aboard in 2003. "I went from playing once or twice a week to playing every day."

In addition to salaries and bonuses, the man who last year sold Grey Goose for $2 billion spends thousands to cover his pros' entry fees and travel costs for tournaments or qualifying schools and has scouts scouring the country for promising amateurs. "He'd love to see us make the PGA Tour," says Travis Williams, 32, a Frank protege playing on the Grey Goose Gateway Tour this year. If we play well, any one of us can do it." When not chasing their Tour dreams, they're hopping a chartered 727 to Barbados or the Bahamas. "We like to look around and say, 'Where's a good place to play?' " Frank says.

He's just along for the ride, but it's the next best thing to swinging. And if some consider it an odd way to spend one's fortune, so be it. "No one in my family objects," Frank says. "Why would they? I've made them all rich."


(Shudder)

You can just feel the purgatory of this existence oozing from every smug sentence, can't you? And how about that “before I knew it I’d quit school and split with my girlfriend.”? What profundity. What a sense of responsibility.

Golf at its best is a way of making the wait for death seem longer than it really is. Didn’t John Peel say that whenever he heard that a friend of his had taken up golf, he mentally crossed them off his list of the living?

I mean, I enjoy a bit of humiliation as much as the next man, providing the next man is a high court judge, but what could be lower than a life like this?

Terri Schiavo and Life in the Abstract

Not too many yeasr ago, if I remember rightly, there was a case vaguely similar to that currently trying the conscience of America, in which a baby born without a brain was being kept on a respirator—whether in the UK or in the States, I can’t recall—and there were calls to keep its heart and lungs working on the grounds that despite not having a brain, it was at least alive.

I remember wondering at the time what purpose this could serve. To what extent could this baby’s life be regarded as a human life, given that there was no possibility of consciousness or the prospective development of consciousness (where the Schiavo case differs, obviously, is on the possibility of recovery)? What was to be gained by the perpetuation of this life? Had I had a blog at the time, I might have suggested that we could harvest the body for stem cells so that at least other people might benefit from the birth of this being, but that would have just been me being provocative, and the hate mail directed my way would have served no purpose except justify my retention of site meter.

Anyhoo, it occurs to me that the reason why protestors could not, even in that case, allow the respirator to be turned off was that old “slippery slope” scenario, according to which, if you concede that it is NOT the case that “every human life is worth living” and therefore sustaining, you risk falling into the trap of having to define “quality of life” limits that make it possible to introduce the acceptability of involuntary euthanasia into the zeitgeist. The alternative was to concede that the baby was not human, which would have led to the equally problematic prospect of having to redefine the boundaries of human existence without conceding ground to pro-choice supporters who contend that partially developed fetuses are “less than fully human.”

As it happened, the “baby” in question died before any real argument could take place (I think the heart gave out), much to the relief, I suspect, of parties on every side of the debate. But the questions remain: Was this recognizably a human existence? If not, do we have obligations to an entity simply because it is living, and would that thereby extend to beings such as plants or nonhuman organisms without brains? And more to the point, do those obligations include keeping it alive or, on occasion, allowing it to die with dignity if it is already moribund?

As a parting thought, and just to be macabre, should it be possible for us to generate fetuses in future without brains, what possible objection could there be to harvesting their stem cells? Indeed, why not produce them precisely for that purpose?

Johnny Dowd

Has a Web site here, where you can get his new album, Johnny Dowd: Live in Manchester, U.K.

It features Sally Timms of the Mekons "playing weird music." No less than one would expect.

More Abject Consumerism

By me, this time. Bought this, the 4-CD box set of Poison Girls recordings (despite already having them on vinyl), and this, one of my all-time favourite movies (ever since I was a nihilistic teenager).

Buying back my own past in commodified form. Can someone define alienation for me?*



*The smartarse answer is "I can. It's track 4 on Chappaquiddick Bridge."

What I Read on My Holidays #1

I thoroughly enjoyed Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, with its witty plot, well-observed parodies of hyperbolic New Ageisms, and gentle darkness, so I was enthusiastic about beginning Diary, his story about struggling hotel maid whose husband lies in a coma and for whom she writes this diary, recounting events in his absence. Misty Wilmot, she who writes, is a once-aspiring artist in reduced circumstances, but as events unfold it transpires that her husband married her as part of a conspiracy by the locals on the island where she now lives, in order to rescue it and them by producing works of such sublimeness that they will induce in their viewers a form of hypnosis.

The book features all of Palahniuk’s usual bag of tricks, including his delight in displaying all of his research (we are presented with countless examples of artists through history whose suffering purportedly accounted for their talent or genius), but the premise of the plot, and its denouement, let the work down big style (spoiler alert!)

Maybe I’m being picky, but the islanders’ conspiracy centres upon Misty’s artworks inducing in its viewers what Palahniuk describes as Stendhal's Syndrome and recounts how Stendhal was so overcome by the works of art he visited in Florence that he was overcome, physically, by their evocative power.

In Diary, we are supposed to believe that all the wealthy outsiders who are ruining the island are so transfixed by Misty’s work that they don’t notice the hotel burning down around them and the fire that ultimately consumes them and rescues the island. I might quite happily have lived with that ending, although I might have felt a bit short-changed, had Palahniuk not specifically introduced Stendhal’s Syndrome and used it as an explanatory tool for the gallery viewers’ behaviour, since the usual understanding of the syndrome is that it is akin to neurasthenia, a sort of feebleness and nervousness. Indeed, just to cap the inappopriateness of Palahniuk’s trope, Stendhal himself recounts in his memoirs how, having being so overcome by the works of art in one particular church, he had to rush outside for fresh air and sit down on a bench to recover his senses. In other words, Stendhal’s Syndrome is a sort of vertiginous experience, a panic attack, the result of the senses being bombarded by overpowering images: The nearest we might come today to this is the uncontrollable excitement exhibited by kids watching consecutive toy adverts in the runup to Christmas.

Georg Simmel, sociologist and theorist of modernity, cited neurasthenia as one of the characteristic psychic states of the modern age but observed that individuals in modern societies had become largely immune to the constant bombardment of the senses from shop window displays, passing crowds, the rivers of traffic. As the novelty of the city wore off, we urban sophisticates got used to, and managed to tune out, this multisensory cacophony, an attitude exemplified by what Simmel referred to as the “blasé.” Thus inured to the exciting, he said, we have become people who are no longer able to be impressed by anything.

Palahniuk’s weekend visitors to the island were such people, people unlikely to be enraptured by anything: They were too urban. But more to the point, their response to works of such sublimeness would have been to rush outside for fresh air, not hang around transfixed in a burning gallery.

Which isn’t to say I don’t generally love Palahniuk's work, only that, this time round, he managed to subvert his own sophisticated air of nonchalance by exhibiting his own provinciality. And that’s a criticism coming from a Brummie who’s proud of his own.