In Memory of Frank Sidebottom & Chris Sievey

I first became aware of Frank Sidebottom when the local TV news magazine ran a piece about him having the hump with Sting and Madonna for nicking his song ideas out of his suit while it was at the dry-cleaners in Timperley Village. I was in stitches from the word go. Living in Timperley meant that there was ample opportunity to see him live, not just at the Summer Carnival, but regularly at the local Labour Club or even at the International in Manchester, and if that didn't satisfy the craving he had his own radio shows and released records, sometimes an LP a week.

During the late 80s he seemed to permeate so many parts of my life: in football he was Tommy Doc's "assistant" at Moss Lane on Saturday afternoons, on Sundays I'd play against his Timperley Big Shorts in the Pub League, and he was on kids' TV on Saturday mornings where one of his co-stars was an old schoolmate of mine. Even the busstop I used every day for work had a flyer for Chris's band, The Freshies, jammed behind the plastic where the timetable should be.

After a hiatus for much of the 90s/00s during which Chris worked successfully in animation (he won an award for writing Pingu), Frank returned with his own telly show on Channel M, not dissimilar to his Fantastic Shed Show of 1992, but with more innovation, such as his experiments in 3D TV. And he started touring again. Last year he played a residency at the LMRCA club at the bottom of our road, which meant I saw him 10 times at a fiver a throw, and every night he had me in stitches, even when he had a hangover. It's these shows I'll probably remember him for as I made many new friends there and they had something of a street party spirit about them.

I only met Chris once. We shared a few beers after his first show abroad in Darmstadt, Germany, a show I flew out specifically to see. He was obviously a very creative and mischievous bloke, but you'd wouldn't have guessed who he was if he hadn't been the only other Englishman there.

I'm so sad he's passed away as I know he had some many things planned in all different types of media. Hopefully they'll see the light of day and he'll get a bit more of the recognition he deserves. I'm missing him already. He still owes me 1p.

Bobbins News

Frank Sidebottom R.I.P.

Ish Friday . Lesh Boogie!

Art Brut - Alcoholics Unanimous

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #3

Sean O'Casey Bridge

It was a source of constant irritation to Joyce that Sean O'Casey had a bridge named after him when no writer had done more to integrate north and south sides of the Liffey into a cohesive and coherent lifeworld than Joyce had. Perhaps his irritation went deeper than that, though. After all, it was Casey who the kids loved; Joyce's atonal modernism couldn't compete with Casey's Stalinist sense of humour, his jaunty nostalgie de la boue, and adolescent sense of indignation. Even today, 300 years later, teenage buskers who should know better congregate on this highly unstable swing bridge to sing "The East Is Red," "Comandante Che Guevara," and "The Silver Tassie." Some of them even try to play the Uilleann pipes, as Casey did, but they tend to get moved on by the Gards as a danger to public safety. Casey also wrote "Red Roses for Me," the first Pogues album. A lot of people think Shane MacGowan got all his ideas about Irishness from going to Westminster public school, but in fact he did meet genuine Irish people, who told him about Casey and co. and whom he then parodied.

Casey, who was never one to bear a grudge, in spite of having loads, once said, "Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other. With neighbours like that it's a wonder he got anything written."

The bloke standing to the right of this scene in the casual beige jacket and trousers is about to nick that scooter.

International Financial Services Centre

Of course, the IFSC was not around in Joyce's time. This was just an urban wasteland of empty warehouses and docklands doing no harm to anyone while occasionally providing a backdrop for movies such as The Commitments, Michael Collins, On the Waterfront, and Moby-Dick. This all changed in 1987, before some of these films had even been made, when Charlie Haughey and Dermot Desmond realized that what Dublin really lacked was a conduit to enable multinationals to avoid paying tax through a combination of reincorporation and lax "light-touch" regulation.

As you can see from the photo above, with friends like that, Freedom in Ireland is always going to be a work in progress. Thus far, as with her American counterpart, only those who have money can get inside her. Yeah, Liberty's a bit of a whore, when it comes down to it. And she's fooling nobody with that book. Where's the second set of accounts, love?

The Ormond Hotel

Home to Honoré de Balzac from 1820 to 1825 and where he wrote his five-act tragedy Cromwell, the Ormond Hotel has seen better days. You'd hope it has, anyway. This is where Joyce both wrote and set Episode 11 of Ulysses, The Sirens, a scene dominated by music; to this very day, the Ormond echoes with the delights of the Terpsichorean muse, mostly from the radios of builders. The Sirens were creatures in ancient Greek mythology, part woman, part seagull, whose enchanting cawing lured sailors to their deaths on the rocky shores of the Sirens' island. The Sirens would then tie the sailors to the masts of their ships and eat their livers for eternity while shitting everywhere and making a right bloody mess, a metaphor used by Anton Chekhov for his play The Seagull and which Alfred Hitchcock more famously used for his movie Rear Window. In Ulysses, Bloom mixes his liver with mashed potatoes, to make it more palatable. And of course, it isn't his liver. It's a pig's. Or maybe a little lamb's.

Joyce wrote this episode in a "musical" style, to reflect the subject matter. A German opera called Martha is frequently referred to, echoing the previous scene set outside Davy Byrne's pub in that Guinness advert, and the episode ends with Bloom letting out a resounding fart as he passes a picture of Robert Emmet. Arse as wind instrument. Ironically, it was a resident setting light to a fart that gave the Ormond the distinctive appearance it has today.

Glasnevin Cemetery

From the top of the round tower over the tomb of Daniel O'Connell, it's possible to see all the way to Naas. And yet, oddly, the tower itself cannot be seen from Naas. This is due to the curvature of the earth or because the tower has four corners to hide round. Nobody knows for sure which.

Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Joyce wrote to Bertrand Russell that had Dublin been destroyed by an atom bomb, "it would be possible to rebuild the entire city, brick by brick, using Ulysses. Though God alone knows why anyone would want to. The place is a shithole." Russell replied, tersely, "There is no God." Dublin corporation rarely, if ever, used either letter to promote Dublin to tourists.

Ulysses is often cited as the culmination of the Modernist tradition. How fitting, then, that we should end here, at the cemetery, for Ulysses represented not just the culmination but the end point of Modernism. If what Joyce claimed for his novel is true, then it is not so much a work of art as a work of anthropology. Indeed, we might say it is the first "postmodern" anthropological text, combining high art, low culture, politics, religion, sport, working-class life, economics, sex and gender relations, and race in a wild, swirling vortex, just as they are in reality. And how fitting, too, that it was Bruno Latour, after whom Latour Eiffel is named, who observed in his book We Have Never Been Modern that a reflexive anthropology alone is capable of giving us an accurate depiction of our society, subverting the imperialist discourse that gave birth to the discipline in the first place. He clearly had Ulysses in mind. Or, if not, another book.

It is sometimes said that all those tossers celebrating Bloomsday are a secret sect of Joyce haters who are, metaphorically, dancing on his grave, making a mockery of him and his book, a work that managed to capture with incredible accuracy a living, breathing, thriving metropolis in all its complexity and subtlety. It is also said that there have been only three people in the world who have read Ulysses from cover to cover and actually understood it. Not one of them knew English. The debate rages on. It's what he would have wanted.

PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part Two)

Friday

Yes, Pixies. They’re about to play on the main stage and Pixies-hill is crowded. They come on stage and there’s a big cheer, and when they open with Cecilia Ann, the crowd’s even louder. They’re on form and faithful to their sound and style. They played most of their classics: 'Velouria', 'Nimrod’s Son', 'Here Comes Your Man', 'Monkey Gone to Heaven', 'Where Is My Mind?', etc. I ruined my vocal chords for a couple of days yelling with 'Debaser' and 'Broken Face'… But what an experience! I’ll never forget that concert.

Saturday

Veronika and me arrive early, for the Minimúsica session, which is about pop bands playing stuff for kids. Sweet, but we soon get tired of it and go to the Pitchfork stage to catch Real State. I don’t know them, we’re told they’re from New Jersey and they became one of my favourite acts of Primavera, very interesting guitars.
When they finish we go to a small stage facing the sea and sit down to watch Gentle Music Men, a Catalan indie band. They’re pretty good and the singer’s got a nice voice. Apparently, they’re quite known for the fact that one of them is the fattest member in an indie band…
After that, I make my way to the Auditorium where I meet Pep, to watch Roddy Frame. He plays a lovely acoustic set and charms the audience. He plays mostly stuff from his solo albums, but also includes 'Oblivious' and 'Walk Out to Winter', which, of course, get a big cheer.
We don’t wait till the end, though, we need to rush to join the others and catch The Drums at some other stage. We’re far away but we can tell they’re having fun. They display their naïve pop stuff with some energy and ‘Let’s Go Surfing’ has become one of my Primavera anthems.
So, what next? Too much takes place at the same time. We’ve already missed Michael Rother presenting Neu! Music, Van Dyke Parks, The Slits and Grizzly Bear (we only arrive in time for their last song). And now, it’s a toss-up between The Charlatans and Built to Spill. We opt for the Mancunians, with the idea of going to Built to Spill after four or five songs. In the end, we stay with The Charlatans for the whole gig. Tim Burgess must have made a pact with the devil, or maybe his long hair covering his face hides the ageing process, but it looks like they’re frozen in time. And they put on a very good show. Their songs, to me, sounded better live than on record. Really, and rather unexpectedly for myself, one of the highlights of this year’s Primavera.
Next, Gary Numan. A bit of a mistery that one, we didn’t know what to expect. After half an hour there was no mistery at all. Gary’s act was pretty boring and people were leaving. And, yes, he played that obscure B-side, ‘Cars’.
Now, another choice. Lee Perry or Pet Shop Boys. They’re so similar… My American mates, Ken and Dave, go to the Pet Shop Boys and me and Veronika go to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, which was good. Not the most exciting of concerts, but the man is a legend and I think it’s worth watching him, in spite of some mildly irritating dancers on dope… At 1.30 in the morning, with the sea breeze, that solid dub-reggae sound somehow fits perfectly. He finishes on time and we can just catch Pet Shop Boys on the big screen, doing their last number ‘West End Girls’, with dancers wearing big square boxes for heads. It looks both silly and arty.
We all regroup and sit down to relax for a while, watching Orbital in the distance at 3 am… and then we go home. It’s been an intense Primavera!

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #2

Westland Row

The birthplace of the playwright and essayist Oscar Wilde, Westland Row is now, as you can see, much grubbier than it was in Bloom's time, both graffitoed and vandalized. Built in 1776 by Jacob Epstein, it now appears to be the permanent home of unkempt students from Trinity College who congregate in indolent clusters hereabout smoking all manner of substances, taking photos of one another, and generally being a nuisance to both the living and the dead. In Ulysses, Bloom pays a visit to Sweny's chemist at the bottom of the street, where he buys some lemon soap, presumably to remove all the lipstick, and a packet of johnnies "in case Molly fancies a tumble when I get home." This is what is generally known to literary scholars as dramatic irony: The reader, unlike Bloom, knows that, at that very moment, Molly is being taken up the shitter by Blazes Boylan, using neither soap nor johnnies.

Sweny's can still be found at its old location. It is now a secondhand bookstore, but it still stocks lemon soap. If you require johnnies, there's another pharmacy a little further up Westland Row, but if you ask the Sweny's staff politely, they are only too happy to lend you johnnies from their own personal stash. The store is under new ownership, and they're trying to oblige all customers. Just say that you always used to get your johnnies there.

Davy Byrne's Pub

Davy Byrne's. The moral pub. The moral being, don't drink in Davy Byrne's. Bloom stops off here and consumes a glass of burgundy and a Gorgonzola sandwich, even though Gorgonzola was not invented until the First World War and anyone who has visited this pub knows that burgundy is only ever drunk out of the brain cavity of the original Davy Byrne, whose skull is kept behind the bar specifically for this purpose, as requested in his will. It has been suggested that this cheese reference is in fact a tribute to Émile Zola, the chronicler of Parisian working-class life on whom Joyce closely modeled his own career. Others have said that it was simply a mistake, one of the several thousand historical inaccuracies that have been spotted in the work to date. Experts in the field are now generally of the view that Joyce was "making it up as he went along."

It is interesting that, per Joyce, nobody drinks Guinness in Davy Byrne's, since the pub featured in a recent advertising campaign celebrating the 250th anniversary of the brewery's founding. In one television advert, drinkers are seen outside the pub offering a toast "To Arthur!" a reference to brewery founder Arthur Guinness, and in a semi-humorous relay of Chinese Whispers across Dublin pubs, the toast becomes increasingly distorted: "To Martha!" "To Hearth Rugs!" "To Bath Plugs!" "To Garth Brooks!" "To Garth Crooks!" and so on, until it has done the rounds of Dublin and gets back to Davy Byrne's, by which time the drinkers have actually sampled the brew. At that point, they shout, as one, "To Lager!" and spend the rest of the night drinking Stella.

But that bit was cut.

The bat motif that you can make out on the wall is the symbol of Bacardi rum. It is often asserted, mistakenly, that the Bass triangle was the first brand logo to appear in a work of art, in Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergere, but this sculpture predates it by 12 years. The motif is also a reminder of another Irish novelist, Bram Stoker, who used to come into Davy Byrne's and drink Bacardi by the gallon. The bar staff let him sleep off his appalling hangovers during the daytime in the cool of the cellars, because the slightest glimpse of sunlight caused him immense agony. Thus was the story of Dracula born.

The National Museum

There are some artifacts behind these doors that date back to the days of pre-history, when humans were little more than grasping, instinctual, selfish, animalistic monsters. Take a contemporary Dublin citizen and hand them one of these items, and they simply wouldn't know what to make of them. There are no clues to how they should be used or, indeed, to how they were used. They belong to an era that we can barely conceptualize, and the presence of these artifacts only compound our confusion. That we should even encounter them in the midst of our own, advanced civilization seems so anachronistic that one can only wonder what purpose could lie behind the act of displaying them to us other than to confront us with the Other which we once were, to disprove Montaigne's assertion, "I am a man. Nothing human is foreign to me."

Leopold Bloom visits the National Museum principally to contemplate the arses of the statues within. There were a number of arseholes in here when we dropped by, too, but we didn't find them arousing in the way Bloom did. Autres temps, autres mœurs.

Martello Tower, Sandycove

At this point in our dérive, we slipped into something long and uncomfortable, namely, the 5.13 DART from Pearse Station to Bray, alighting at Sandycove in order to visit the Martello Tower where Joyce opens his novel. The DART now runs underground, and the drivers are all French.

As you can see, Sandycove is, despite its name, one of Dublin's leafier suburbs. The Tower itself, in the distance, was built by the British to spot Napoleon's forces should he attempt anything so underhand as inciting the Irish to revolt. Joyce has Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus play his modern-day "lookouts," although they fall out over the fact that Mulligan has invited an Englishman, Haines, to stop with them, thereby illustrating the tension between Irishmen of the time over their relationship to Empire. Also, there are only two beds.

There are 365 steps to the top of the Martello Tower, which is why Mulligan complains about his tea being cold when Dedalus brings it up to him. There are several witty puns about Dedalus taking years over breakfast that will escape readers unless they know this fact. Several other puns relating to cramps, caresses, and Crete cannot be fully appreciated without a full knowledge of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, who jumped off a high tower to escape King Minos. Interestingly, Paul McCartney got the name of his band Wings from this chapter of the book. The Beatles acquired their name from the Ladybird Book of Beetles.


Part the Third suivant.

Dublin Psychogeographical Society: Bloomsday Special #1

In honour of Ireland's first flâneur après la lettre, Leopold Bloom, members of the Dublin Psychogeographical Society took it upon themselves this year to re-create his dérive, as described in James Joyce's remarkable novel Ulysses, and in our usual spirit of bloody-mindedness, to do it in Paris, source originaire de la flâneuristicisme and spiritual home of the Lettrist International and Situationism. The coach from Beauvais brought us, in the first acte gratuit of the day, to the portals of the James Joyce Pub, an omen, some of us imagined, a portending portal, if you will, a benevolent Delphic, nay, Homeric, augur signifying the Immortals' blessing on our adventure. Others amongst us pointed out that the bus always stops here.

The Guinness Brewery

Not, strictly speaking, the Ulyssean starting point, and thanks to the four Thermoses of room-temperature red wine we had packed and the ready availability of imbibing establishments for which Paris is renowned, Bloom's original path as described in the book soon became more of a drunkard's stagger, although we endeavoured to reach as many points of interest as we could, regardless of their chronological order in the text. Nonetheless, in many ways the Guinness Brewery constitutes a suitable starting point for our day out. "A Visit to Guinness' Brewery" is an essay topic suggested in Finnegans Wake, and as Joyce once observed, Dubh Linn, the uncorrupted name of Ireland's capital, means "black pool," identifying a subconscious motivation for the consumption of this darkest and foulest of beers by the unsuspecting natives. The brewery is thus an oneiric spring, the city's fount from which all life and death bubbles forth, dark and laden with original sin, much like Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal. Metaphorically, then, the Brewery evokes not just Dublin's alcohol-sodden Viking past but also Holles Street Hospital, setting for Joyce's Oxen and the Sun scene in Ulysses, and the place where modern-day Dubliners give birth to their own Fleurs du mal.

The tower you see in the picture gives visitors a 360-degree view of the entire city of Dublin. It also marks the precise location of the Marquis de Sade's liberation after the Brewery was stormed in 1789. In those days, the citizens of Dublin had the wit to make former inmates members of their parliament. Today's Dubliners can't even manage to do the reverse.

We were taken on a tour of the Brewery (you can see the building behind), but we were forcibly ejected at the end of the tour when we demanded our free pints of Guinness. So much for Irish hospitality.

The Phoenix Park

Ah yes, the phoenix, mythological bird ripe for all sorts of linguistic jiggery-pokery but never much good for cooking. We were surprised upon our arrival to see how literally the parks department has taken the name, the park's fields being liberally covered over with what at first sight looked to be ashes. Closer examination revealed it to be sand, however, much to the delight of our pro-Situ members always on the lookout for the beach beneath the cobbles. A couple of the capital's young bucks were engaged in what we took to be some kind of religious rite involving clubs and a round projectile. Could this be the fabled "hurling," the Irishman's national sport? If so where was the vomit and blood? Or polo, perhaps? Our map indicated that there were polo grounds around here somewhere. Or were they simply two strapping Irish lads revelling in their own strength and vigour, frolicking gamely in the sunshine on the ersatz beach, their own Sandymount Strand, while lusty onlookers furtively masturbated behind the rocks? Who can say? More than one of us on encountering this scene thought immediately of Albert Camus and his love of outdoor life on the beaches of Algeria. A Joycean link here too: So struck was he by the structure and plot of Ulysses that Camus sketched out the plan for a novel about Bloom's mother, culminating with her death at the hands of her son on June 15th, 1904. The fact that Bloom makes no reference in Ulysses to the murder of his mother for the entirety of the next day transforms this Everyman into the archetypal modern-day psychopath, an Outsider not merely by virtue of his Jewishness, but by virtue also of his lack of fellow-feeling, the affectless, blasé personality incarnate, to use Simmel's categorisation.

Of course, we know what happened next. Bloom became Meursault, the Outsider who kills an Arab for kicks. The opening line of that book?: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."

La Peste is better, anyway.

Mountjoy Prison

To inmates, "The Joy." To the screws, "The Mount." To the locals, "Mounters," "Joyo," "Priso," "Ountjoyp." Home to de Sade in his senility and madness, to Behan in his cups, to several popes (frocked, defrocked and unfrocked), and, a surprise to many, quite a few little old ladies, some of whom just love the place and keep coming back simply because they enjoy the company and the warmth, others amongst them who cannot help but come back because they are so thoroughly institutionalized they cannot cope with life on the outside. Sartre once said, ridiculously, that every man is free, even in prison. What he forgot to add is that even outside a prison's walls, a man can carry a prison inside his head. The former inmates of this particular asylum are frequently damaged in this way. Once the madness acquired in this particular building gets under your skin, it can require decades of re-education, beatings, and waterboarding to flush it out of you.

There is no truth to the rumour, incidentally, that the cells are so crowded that inmates develop hunchbacks. Though critics are yet to determine why Behan wrote about an old triangle instead of the bells, the bells.

Holles Street Hospital

The setting of the Oxen and the Sun portion of the novel and the site of the Guillotine during the Revolution, here it is that Ireland's monstrous beauties are born. As Baudelaire, described by Walter Benjamin as the master expositor of modernity, once said, "the unique and supreme pleasure of making love lies in the certitude of doing evil." Molly Bloom's "Yes, yes, I said, yes," thus becomes an affirmation of evil, a declaration of nihilism that encapsulates the modernist spirit. It is fucking that leads to creation, to birth. Baudelaire's evil flowers are his poems, while Joyce generates Ulysses by fucking with language. The Revolution itself gave birth to Modernity, to Saint-Simonism, Comtean Positivism, the ontological rupture between subject and object, knower and known, mind and body. It is no coincidence to those astute enough to notice that the executioner's tool of choice during the Revolution was the Guillotine, not because of its purported humaneness or its symbolic representation of progress, but because it enacted the literal separation of body and mind. The Guillotine is Descartes' Cogito put to the task of social cleansing. And, in the same stroke, it is a symbol of rebirth, a cutting of the umbilical cord between parent and child, the birth of a new nation, a new society, out of the death pangs of the old.

A happy confluence of birth and death, then, echoing not just the Guinness Brewery where we began our day's outing, but also Glasnevin Cemetery, where I fear we shall all end up, whether it be by accident or design or misreading of the map while langered.

Part the Second to Follow.

PRIMAVERA REVIEW (Part One)

Hi all, this is my personal account of the Primavera festival in Barcelona, in two parts... Sorry about the delay.

Thursday

We arrive at 20 h, just in time for The Fall. Mark E. Smith starts mumbling ‘your future-ah is our clutter-ah…’ and there’s non-stop from then on, with the band, very solid, playing their typically repetitive but vibrant sound. They’re on the main stage and we can mostly see them on the big screen. Mark E. Smith reminds me of a guy in my local area who sleeps on a bench surrounded by cans of beer… But he’s still alive! And they’re a great act.
After that we caught The XX. I’ve heard of them but don’t know their stuff. They sound gentle and interesting, but after them, Broken Social Scene stole the show. They play quite a few songs from their last album, and, maybe it was the beers, but I can’t recall them playing a classic like ‘Anthems for a 17 year old girl’, but still, on stage they’re funny and inventive.
And after that, at 1 am, Pavement are… Pavement. Good songs and a good band… but the beers I’ve drunk are taking their toll now…

Friday

My friend Veronika and I arrive in time for A Sunny Day in Glasgow. To me, the songs are OK, pretty good, but mostly I love their live act. Too short, though, which is fine because it gives us time to go to the Auditorium to watch Low perform ‘The Great Destroyer’. The place is packed and we struggle to find seats. Well, in fact we don’t find them… We sit on the corridors and are told by security to move on somewhere else. That happened three or four times until we managed to find two seats. And as for the show… oh my god, it’s beautiful. Very moving. Definitely, one of the highlights of the festival.
When we leave the Auditorium I join my mate Pep and we both go to see Wire, whilst Veronika goes to see Here We Go Magic. They’re very noisy and mad, she tells me, but she enjoyed the show. Wire weren’t too noisy nor mad, but they were good, they played some classics (not the Elastica song, though…) and I was happy to see them live for the first time.
We join the others and make our way towards the main stage to catch a bit of Wilco. Maybe because I’ve seen them before, maybe because we were far away and I wasn’t paying attention, concentrated in getting drinks, they sounded to me a bit MOR-ish. I think really we were all geared up for the next act, the stars of this year’s Primavera, Pixies (to be continued…)

"These two need to spend six months in a third world country building schools."

Linder Sterling interviewed by Morrissey in Interview Magazine.

It's Friday. Let's Boogie!

John Hyatt - Boomerang Love

Cognitive Surplus

Two guys plugging their latest books can actually generate a stimulating discussion, as demonstrated by this brief conversation between Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink in the June issue of Wired magazine. Pink's book is called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. Shirky's is called Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Excerpts that attracted my interest:

Shirky: . . . Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource. It’s what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.

Pink: A surplus that post-TV media—blogs, wikis, and Twitter—can tap for other, often more valuable, uses.

Shirky: That’s what’s happening. Television was a solitary activity that crowded out other forms of social connection. But the very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.

. . .

Shirky: Right—because television crowded out other forms of social engagement. Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.

. . .

Pink: . . . Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in “if you do this, then you’ll get that”—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.

Shirky: You talk about the laws of behavioral physics working differently in practice from what we believe in theory.

Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don’t want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well.

Shirky: If you assume bad faith from the average participant, you’ll probably get it. In social media, the design principle that has worked remarkably well is to treat good faith as the normal case and to regard defections from that as essentially a special case to be solved.

Pink: Same goes with organizations. We don’t realize how much our unexamined assumptions take us to radically different places. If I’m running an organization and my starting premise about human beings is that people are fundamentally passive and inert, that they won’t do a damn thing unless I threaten them with a stick or entice them with a carrot, that takes me down one road. But I think that’s the wrong premise, the wrong theory of human nature.

Shirky: The power of the default setting.

Pink: I think our nature is to be active and engaged. I’ve never seen a 2-year-old or a 4-year-old who’s not active and engaged. That’s how we are out of the box. And if you begin with this presumption, you create much more open, flexible arrangements that almost inevitably lead to greater satisfaction for individuals and great innovation for organizations.

Irish Anarchist Review

Issue 1 out now. Details and pdf here.

Always Interesting

David Graeber, that is, being interviewed here by Yiannis Aktimon of the Void network. Some highlights:

Void Network: what are the major challenges of antiauthoritarian movement of today? Is there really a revolution to be waited for, or in truth, the radical procedure of present, has to do with the ideas and forces of a general daily reformation of life?

D.G.: Globally, I think we are at a turning point, but that turning point has been, as it were, endlessly suspended. One reason the alter-globalization movement slowed down so in the second half of the '00s was not just the lingering effects of the war on terror and resultant stepping up of repression, but the fact that the other side simply couldn't get their act together. They were faced with enormous structural crises, really, the effects of the same broad diffuse popular resistance of which are movements were perhaps the most self-conscious, explicit, and articulate form. Yet all they did was bicker with each other at their summits - they didn't really seem to have a strategy, and thus, it was very hard to come up with a strategy of opposition. This might be changing now. As for the grand strategic question: well, I don't think the transformation of daily life, and the larger question of revolution, can any longer be clearly separated. How might radical transformation happen? We can't know. We're really flying blind. But I also think we've been working with a very limited set of historical analogies: the history of revolutionary movements first in Europe in the 18th and 19th century, then globally in the 20th, but that's it. It's a tiny tiny slice of human history. There have been hundreds of successful revolutions in world history we don't even know how to see. It's quite likely that many of the "primitive communists" in say, the Eastern Woodlands of North America that so inspired Engels, or in Amazonia, weren't primitive at all, but the descendants of revolutionaries, of people who had overthrown earlier centralized states. The world is much more complicated, and the history of resistance much deeper than we have been taught to imagine. Or another way of making the same point: we have come to accept, over the last couple hundred years, since the Enlightenment basically, that there is only one paradigm for fundamental social change, "the transition from feudalism to capitalism" - which must then be the model for the next one, "the transition from capitalism to socialism" (or whatever). It's becoming screamingly obvious that the transition to whatever comes next is not going to look like that. So people think no revolutionary change is possible at all. Nonsense. Capitalism is unsustainable. Something will replace it. For me, I think a more useful paradigm right now is the transition from slavery to feudalism, at least in Europe. Remember, under Rome, huge percentages of the population of the empire were outright chattel slaves (maybe a third, even, and much more if you count the coloni and debt-peons and so on who were effectively slaves). A few hundreds years later, the number of slaves in Europe was almost none. This was one of the greatest liberations in human history (and similar things did happen in India and China around the same time.) How did it happen? How were all the slaves freed? Well, since we're only used to seeing it from an elite perspective as "the decline and fall of the Roman empire" and can't see any explicit anti-slavery movements, we're unable to write the history at all, but it happened. Will wage-slavery be eliminated in a similar apparently catastrophic and confused moment? It's possible. But it could only happen the first because of pressure from below, based on certain egalitarian values that were always there, all operating below the historical radar screen. Obviously, there were also horrific thugs taking advantage of the chaos, as there will be now too. But we need to think about how to mobilize similar bottom-up alliances when things start breaking down.

Void Network: Is there really a national and international debt? What would you like to put as a small analysis of what it seems to be the Greek paradigm in the great saga of domino financial collapse of many countries economies after the 2008 broke of international crisis?

D.G.: Money nowadays is a purely political instrument. Some people - central bankers, to some degree ordinary banks and even the financial divisions of large firms - have the right to generate it, to make up money, relatively as they wish. Banks after all don't mostly lend money they actually have, they lend money they just made up - if under certain constraints. So the rhetoric people use, that "there's only so much money" is nonsense. Money isn't like oil, it's not even like bananas, you can't actually run out of it. So the scam is to allow some people to just whisk it into existence and then, even more importantly, to say that other people can't. In a way banks' ability to make money is not so outrageous since money is basically debt, it's an IOU, a promise, and in a free society everyone should have the right to make promises. In a way that's what being "free" means. The problem is in our society, the only really important promises are financial, and some people are granted the political right to make as many of these as they like, with no little or responsibility for keeping them, and others (the politically powerless) are not, and everyone acts as if the most important moral responsibility everyone has is to pay back money that others were allowed to simply make up. This is particularly ridiculous in the case of governments, who grant the banks the right to make up the money, and then act as if they have no choice but to honor their commitments to these same people. It's all nonsense. But it's just a new variant of an age-old pattern. Conquerors, tyrants, powerful lords throughout human history have always tried to convince their subjects or those they conquer that they owe them something, at the very least, that they owe them their life, for not having massacred them all. It's basically the logic of slavery (I could have killed you, I didn't, now you owe me everything) but it's also the foundation of what we like to call "sovereignty." The unusual thing about the present day is just that this sovereignty has been transferred from states to this semi-independent financial establishment as a way of undercutting any notion that sovereignty any longer belongs with what they used to call "the people."

. . .

Void Network: Are there any values that have to be defended against the formulated extremity of extreme nihilism and elitism?

D.G.: Someone once said that the ultimate stakes of any political struggle is the ability to define what value is. Autonomy does not just mean making up one's own rules, as Castoriadis says, though that's important - it also means being free to collective establish what you think value is. In that way, any enclave that preserves a system of value even relatively autonomous from capital is a form of freedom that should be defended. One of the terrible mistakes of old-fashioned socialism was to subordinate everything to the revolution in the same way that capitalists subordinate everything to profit. It's funny because I'm often accused of criticizing anthropologists and academics for not helping radical social movements. That's not true at all. I think it's a scandal that many seem actively opposed, or pretend to be leaders when they're not, or refuse to engage with people who want their help. But I also think that it's absolutely great that there are people who get to spend their lives thinking about, I don't know, Medieval Provencal musical instruments as an end in themselves. I call this the utopian moment in academia. Don't we want people to be able to do this? Anyway, for me, a free society is one where there are endless varieties of forms of value, and people can decide for themselves which they wish to pursue. Therefore the key social question is "how do we provide people with sufficient life security, in a free society, that they are able to be as free as possible to pursue those forms of value (moral, artistic, spiritual, hedonistic, communal, etc, etc etc) they feel to be the most important - whatever these may be."

. . .

Void Network: what is your present attitude about the end of traditional labour? Would you like to give us some more analysis of your current approach?

D.G. : Well, our horizon has to be the abolition of work in its conventional form. For me, I again find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with the Italians who say the production of value is now dispersed through all forms of social life, so we need to think about a social wage. My objection is they seem to think there's something new here, that "immaterial labor" or the dominance of such is a new development. I find this racist and sexist. They seem to think that in the 19th century, value was produced exclusively by factory work, or anyway paid employment, but that now, especially since the '70s, the real cutting-edge is the production of the informational and stylistic content, and context, or commodities - "immaterial labor" (a stupid phrase, it's not immaterial in any sense). Why? Well, when looking at such analysis, the way to understand it, I always say, is to follow a simple principle: "follow the white guys." Was there no one working outside the factory on the informational or stylistic or cultural aspects of the commodity, etc.? Of course. But they were mostly women, so they say, well, who cares, that's not part of the production of value, it's all in the factories where the white guys are. Now, most factory work is being done by women and/or people of color so suddenly, factory work is unimportant and it's the white guys working on computers, etc., who are really producing value. Nonsense. What we need to start thinking about is how all these new forms of labor, and some very old ones, draw on one another. For every person who can push a button and instantaneously do a transaction with Japan that would have taken weeks in the past, there's some guy in Brazil or Pakistan who has to work twice as many hours or spend hours more on the bus just getting to work so he can do it. We need to look at the world as a whole. We also need to understand that war and imperial extraction still operate and how, which brings us back to the money system again (modern credit money is basically war debt created by governments who borrow the money to create the means of coercion, then allow the bankers to lend that debt to everyone else - and use the means of coercion to enforce the debts. This is the regime under which all labor now operates.)

Erm . . . Mirage

Peter Boone and Simon Johnson, in the New York Times last week, asking whether the Irish economic miracle was real or not.

Ireland was one of the first nations to introduce tough fiscal austerity in this cycle — in spring 2009 the government slashed public-sector spending and raised taxes. Despite the cuts, the European Commission forecasts that Ireland will have one of the highest budget deficits in the world at 11.7 percent of gross domestic product in 2010. The problem is clear: when you cut spending you also lose tax revenues from people who earned incomes from that money. Further, the newly unemployed seek benefits, so Ireland’s spending cuts in one category are partly offset by more spending in another. Without growth, the budget deficit still looms large.

Ireland’s problems are, sadly, far deeper than the need for simple fiscal austerity. The Celtic Tiger’s impressive reported growth over the past decades was in part based on its aggressive attempts to help major corporations in the United States reduce their tax bills. The Irish government set corporate taxes at just 12.5 percent of profits, thus attracting all sorts of businesses — from computer services like Google and Yahoo, to drug companies like Forest Labs — that set up corporate bases and washed profits through Ireland to keep them out of the hands of the Internal Revenue Service.

The remarkable success of this tax haven means that roughly 20 percent of Irish gross domestic product is actually “profit transfers” that raise little tax for Ireland and are owned by foreign companies. Since most of these profits are subject to the tax code, they are accounted for in Ireland where they are lightly taxed; they should not be counted as part of Ireland’s potential tax base. A more robust cross-country comparison would be to examine Ireland’s financial condition ignoring these transfers. This is easy to do: a nation’s gross national product excludes the profits of foreign residents. For most nations, gross national product and G.D.P. are nearly identical, but in Ireland they are not.

When we adjust Ireland’s figures accordingly, the situation is dire. The budget deficit was about 17.9 percent of G.N.P. in 2009, and based on European Commission projections (and assuming the G.N.P.-G.D.P. gap remains the same) it will be roughly 14.6 percent in 2010 and 15.1 percent in 2011, while the debt-to-G.N.P. ratio at the end of this year is expected — by our calculation — to be 97 percent, and 109 percent at the end of 2011. These numbers make Ireland look similarly troubled to Greece, with a much higher budget deficit but lower levels of public debt.

Ireland’s politicians, rather than facing up to their problems, are making things ever worse. Simply put, the Irish miracle was a mirage driven by clever use of tax-haven rules and a huge credit boom that permitted real estate prices and construction to grow quickly before declining ever more rapidly. The biggest banks grew to have assets twice the size of official G.D.P. when they essentially failed in 2008. The government has now made a fateful choice: rather than make creditors pay some part of the losses, it is taking the bank debt onto the national balance sheet, effectively ballooning its already large sovereign debt. Irish taxpayers are set to be left with the risk of very large payments to make on someone else’s real estate deals gone bad.

There is no simple escape, but if the government hopes to avoid a sovereign default, the one overriding priority should be to stop bailing out the banks. Instead, the government should wind down existing banks in a “bad bank,” while moving their deposit base and profitable businesses into new, well-capitalized banks that can function without a taxpayer burden. This will be messy, but it is far better than a sovereign default.

I guess Not.

Listen!

In Our Time: Anarchism

Persons Unknown Trial

Following on from the post below, a series from one of the jurors at the Persons Unknown trial, in which Vince Stephenson was involved. There are a couple of "anonymous" comments from Ronan Bennett, also one of the defendants, under some of the posts.

Post One

Post Two

Post Three

Post Four

Post Five

Post Six

Post Seven

Post Eight

final part (closing credits) in my post below.

While Googling, I also found a nice post at Darren's worth a look, even if you've read it before. It even manages to get Mike Leigh's High Hopes in! :-) There's a link there to an interview with Stuart Christie in 3:AM magazine.

Halcyon Daze

The Kill Your Pet Puppy website has a post about the old Autonomy Centre in Wapping. In the early 80s I used to pop down on a Friday afternoon after a visit to the Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel, just to see what was going on. Normally nothing. Just Vince Stephenson reading a book or looking for a game of chess (I never took up the challenge. I was useless at the time . . . in so many ways). A copper strolled in on one occasion for a nose around, but he didn't stay very long.

My fellow Brummies UB40 played a benefit gig for the Autonomy Centre at Woolwich Odeon. I believe it was the first time they performed stuff from their second album, Present Arms. I still have the T-shirt. The support band was The Nervous Kind, another Brummie band.

Bizarrely/coincidentally, Paul Comaskey from Nervous Kind turns up here. His sister-in-law used to be married to Richard Buckner.

It's a very small world indeed.

How to Understand the Economy

More a bookmark for my own future reference, I think, there's a review here at the New York Review of Books, by Robert Solow, of Duncan Foley's book Adam's Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology, a book I've already read. The review itself is interesting, however, for what it has to say about theories of value. Solow for the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on economic growth. He's the author of Growth Theory: An Exposition, which should keep you going through the warm summer nights ahead.

Foley's book is a primer in economics and, as Solow observes, it has its flaws even in that regard. There are more interesting things you could be doing with your time.

How Fucked Are We?

Spotted over at Progressive Economy, this article from the Financial Times, by David Gardner.

Encouraged by venal politicians who actively discouraged regulation and provided a phenomenal array of tax breaks to builders, and in an environment of cheap money and easy credit (partly created by the lower borrowing costs brought by membership of the eurozone, partly because risk disappeared from the international financial radar), Irish banks went on a reckless lending spree. They lent, above all, to property developers. When that bubble burst – and with devaluing the currency no longer an option – it all but bankrupted the country and triggered a painful sequence of tax rises and pay, pension and public spending cuts.

When the banks started to wobble, the government, led by the populist Fianna Fáil, insisted Ireland’s economic “fundamentals” were sound and such problems as there were had blown in across the Atlantic. But when the banks inevitably crashed and the state stepped in to rescue them, every Irish citizen got saddled with many thousands of euros in debts that will weigh the country down for years to come. The current generation – the first in Ireland’s history to know real wealth and success and, with it, international admiration – is very, very angry.

Whatever politicians say, moreover, Ireland knows this was almost entirely a home-made crisis, which happened to coincide with an international credit crunch. Colm McCarthy, who teaches economics at University College Dublin, is the author of last year’s comprehensive spending review of the public sector: “300 pages, and a cut on each page”, as he genially puts it. This one-man-International Monetary Fund is no populist. But he’s clear on what brought Ireland to this pass. “This was a very old-fashioned banking collapse, nothing to do with derivatives and US toxic assets,” he says. “Until a few years ago I thought AIB [Allied Irish Bank] and Bank of Ireland were dull, ­boring banks run by granite-faced bastards who wouldn’t lend money to their own relatives. It seems we were wrong.”

In its report on Ireland last year, the IMF concluded: “The Irish economy is in the midst of an unprecedented economic correction. The stress exceeds that being faced by any other advanced economy and matches episodes of the most severe economic distress in post-World War II history.”

At the height of the lunacy, around three-quarters of the total lending by Irish banks – €420bn or about two and a half times the size of the economy – got bound up in property, construction and land speculation of one sort or another, a sector which amounted to more than a fifth of economic output. It became what Ireland did for a living. By comparison, investment in real estate in Spain peaked at about a tenth of national income – half Ireland’s level.

Morgan Kelly observes here:

Fifteen fat years allowed the Irish government to cut income taxes, increase spending and still run a budget surplus. Between 2007 and 2009 however, tax revenue fell by 20%, while expenditure rose by 9%, moving the state from a balanced budget to a deficit of 12% of GDP. In contrast to its inept handling of the banking crisis, the Irish government has moved decisively to reduce expenditure and increase tax rates, and appears on target to reduce its deficit to 3% of GDP by 2012.

Ireland’s government debt is still moderate. At the end of 2009 gross debt was 65% of GDP and, after subtracting the state pension reserve and pre-funded borrowing, net debt was 40% of GDP. Assuming that deficit targets are not missed too badly, gross debt should still be under 85% of GDP by the end of 2012.


This debt would probably be manageable, had the Irish government not casually committed itself to absorb all the gambling losses of its banking system. If we assume – optimistically, I believe – that Irish banks eventually lose one third of what they lent to property developers, and one tenth of business loans and mortgages, the net cost to the Irish taxpayer will be nearly one third of GDP.

Adding these bank losses to its national debt will leave Ireland in 2012 with a debt-GDP ratio of 115%. But if we look at the ratio in terms of GNP, which gives a more realistic picture of the Ireland’s discretionary tax base, this is a debt-GNP ratio of 140% – above the ratio that is currently sinking Greece. Even if bank losses are only half as large as we expect, Ireland is still facing a debt-GNP ratio of 125%.

Ireland is like a patient bleeding from two gunshot wounds. The Irish government has moved quickly to stanch the smaller, fiscal hole, while insisting that the litres of blood pouring unchecked through the banking hole are “manageable”. Capital markets may not continue to agree for long, triggering a borrowing crisis which will start, most probably, with a run on Irish banks in inter-bank markets.

Ireland may therefore present an early test of the EU bailout fund. However, in contrast to Greece, Ireland’s woes stem almost entirely from its banking system, and could be swiftly and permanently cured by a resolution which shares the losses of Irish banks with the holders of their €115 billion of bonds through a partial debt for equity swap.

I may consider emigrating. Greece looks nice.

It's Friday. Let's Do Some Filing!

I,Ludicrous - Clerking Til I Die

(For Kathy)