We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I can only assume that Michael Moore was too busy:
Nearly four years after the collapse of the World Trade Center, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone will direct a film based on the story of two police officers who were trapped in the rubble on Sept. 11, 2001.
And in that rubble, the two stricken men will miraculously find ‘proof’ that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by a CIA-Halliburton-Zionist-BushHitler conspiracy. But the evidence will all mysteriously disappear after thay hand it in and some snarling unidentified suit with a Texan accent will warn them to “keep their big mouths shut”.
The last pub covered in this series is one I have known for the longest time: Paddy Reilly’s. I first came to it whilst traveling with Irish bass guitarist Dee Moore a decade ago. There has been some remodeling since then, but Tony DeMarco’s Thursday session goes on. I have no idea how long he has been at it but he has become a New York institution. He is also a very fine fiddle player, known and welcome in any session in Ireland.
The session in full flight. Tony DeMarco on fiddle at left.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
I arrived a bit early tonight and while sipping my first pint of the evening overheard a fellow I had never seen before. He told a couple at the bar how tightly knit the global traditional music scene is: how you can go to a session anywhere and in a few minutes chat with a new found trad player find people you know in common.
I put it to the test and I hit it in one. In fact, of the first six people I named there was only one who was not well known to us both. Later in the evening the fellow’s name, Jon Hicks, finally clicked in my mind. The aforementioned old friend, Dee, produced his first CD.
Jon is from Northern England; he lived in the West of Ireland for a number of years and is now on the road to becoming a permanent New York resident. From the quality of picking I heard, I believe he will be a welcomed addition to the local music scene.
Singer-Songwriter Jon Hicks.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
It was a lovely session, typical of the decades long run of Tony’s session. Whether due to the events in London or just vageries of the summer holidays, the crowd was thin tonight. Not too thin though. We had a lively young woman who had her first introduction to Irish traditional music and was totally enthralled by the skilled musicianship involved. I think she will be back.
Trad music seems to attracts beautiful women.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
I woke this morning to the sad news posted here by Brian and David and there is little I can add from far off Manhattan. Maybe I will be moved to pontificate later, but for now I will continue on with life as planned.
Last night was not a session bar night. I only have one more night in New York before becoming buried in R&D work again and The Scratcher is a must visit. It is my Manhattan local of eight years standing. Until a few years ago it was also the site of the Wednesday session so I can at least claim a figleaf on its inclusion in the five day crawl.
The bar has always been more a trendy den of iniquity than a trad place. The staff are Irish and Scottish; the clientele are an eclectic mix of models, actresses, musicians, filmmakers and young professionals during the pre-midnight hours. As the clock ticks into the morning hours the american percentage falls precipitously until in the wee hours, by the sound of the surrounding accents, one could as well be in a London or Dublin pub as New York.
The secretive outer aspect of the Scratcher.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
The staff are good people and include a number of musicians who work here when not gigging or touring. The owner is a big supporter of music and this is one of the ways he helps the New York music scene.
Brendan O’Shea, like several other staff bartenders has been here since the late nineties. It is a nice feeling to come back to a place year after year and have a nod and a smile as you walk in the door.
Brendan at work… or perhaps play?
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
Some of the staff I would call friend as well. If you drop into my New York local I ask that you tip really well. If you misbehave Natalie will tell on you and I will personally ban you from Samizdata!
Natalie at work covering the family bills.
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
If you are looking for intellectual chatter, come after midnight or early on a weekday night and you are bound to find someone to go on at length about just about anything. If you come by during the weekend night madness, pick up a model and end up bonking your mutual brains out in the interchangeable sex loos, just remember where you heard about this marvelous little place. There is something for everyone here.
It is Tuesday night and I am still standing. It is actually not the drinking that does you in. It is the late night navigation of the New York subway system. Last night it took me an hour and a half to get home. Partly it is that fewer trains are running; but it is also all the repairs and shifting around of trains that happens at night. I often wonder if the City is in cahoots with Yellow Cab to make getting home late at night on the subway such a miserable prospect that you would rather reach into your pocket book for $30 to travel the length of the island.
Nonetheless, I arrived at the Swift Bar with time to spare: time enough for a warm up pint or two before the music. Even without music it is a fascinating bar to drink in. The place has a Victorian look in keeping with the Jonathan Swift theme.
An impressive old style bar Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
The truly unique part of the bar are the murals. I photographed one small section of the main mural. It is filled with detail and humour enough to keep your eyes wandering over it until you have had too many pints to focus or until they have settled on something lovely and drinking beside you.
A ghostly presence in the mural Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
The session itself is usually quite large and with an audience to match. This particular night was pretty dead although the music was as good as ever. I have been in this bar on standing room nights with musicians several seats deep around the main table. It is also not unusual for touring musicians to stop by. The last time I was here I came by with singer Niamh Parsons (an old and dear friend of many years standing, so go buy her records!) after her tour gig. Athena O�Lochlainn, a well known fiddle player once with Sharon Shannon’s band also happened to drop in. It is that kind of session (Yes, I know Sharon too).
Eamon O’Leary plays piano… as well as his usual banjo, guitar and Mandolin. Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
Hundreds of thousands of tourists and New Yorkers headed for the extravaganza riverside fireworks display last night. I was not one of them. I have done it before and did not tonight feel a herring-like desire to join the tightly packed school of fellow hominids on the riverine Manhattan coast. What I did have a desire for was a quiet pint of well-pulled Guinness and some good music. I knew exactly where to find it on a Monday night: Mona’s.
Mona’s is a small pub in the Lower East Side. It is a local in every sense of the word. There is no big flashing “Monas” sign outside. There is, in fact, no sign at all. Just a window through which you can see a very dark pub that is decidedly not ferns and chrome. No wimpy idiotic ‘theme’. Just a place that has grown organically around its central purpose of beer, music and pool for a neighborhood clientele. When I first lifted a pint here some eight years ago, it was in a neighborhood which had transitioned from broken glass and junkies in the doorways to one which was merely for the adventurous, a hangout for musicians and a hodgepodge of starving artists, writers, actresses, bikers and Irish expats. Since then the neighborhood has changed. It seems like almost the whole of Avenue B has gone way upscale. The tide of new bars has not yet reached 14th Street and the clientele is still neighborhood… but you are now more likely to run into a med student outside than a junkie.
The session at Mona’s is a very informal and relaxed affair. There is usually a core of fine musicians, but anyone who loves the music can join in. Some of the better musicians take time over a long break to show newcomers a few tunes and techniques.
As you can see, it is a very homey session:
A very traditional session at Mona’s Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.
Traditional music attracts classy fiddle players Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.
The New York traditional music scene has been a home away from home for me for almost a decade. My familiarization with it began when I toured with a band and sang here in 1994; it expanded greatly when I worked on a series of internet webcasts and spent a good chunk of 1998 living in the East Village. During that hot summer of 1998 I had a weekly pub schedule to follow. The crowd of musicians I got to know so well floated in an eternal circuit from the Monday Session through to the Sunday Session. Many of the same people are still to be found on the same weekly rounds and only one of the Sessions has died off over the last seven years.
So… Sunday night. That’s the Doc Watson’s night. For the hardcore musicans, the Sunday drinking actually starts in the afternoon at the Thady Con’s Session, but I had engineering notes to prepare.
Doc Watsons is in the Upper East side and not the easiest place to get to from where I am staying in the Upper West. This business trip has been going well so I splurged on a taxi rather than the usual long A train and crosstown bus trip. The first taxi to stop was from a Car Service, not one of the metered Yellow ones. I have been around the city long enough to know to dicker the price before one goes anywhere. The ride is nicer but you could be in for a surprise if you have not got the price set first. If you are a stranger to the city you won’t know whether a price is reasonable or not so I would probably not recommend it without the advice of a local friend. The Yellow ones are safer for tourists.
I have sung at Doc Watson’s myself, although not in many years. I have been too busy surviving as a consultant to keep any material up to what I would consider professional performance standards. Since I have been there and done that, I have more to lose making a complete fool of myself on stage than most. One never knows: perhaps the day will fall when I must survive at it. It is best I not leave bar owners and public with memories of blue notes and effed lyrics to replace older,better memories of mostly competent performance. Instead, I competently hold up the bar and drink Guinness.
The pub has a Sunday anchor band that is usually John Redmond and Peter Rufli, fellows I know from years past. This Sunday John was not present and Peter had several other fine musicians with him.
Right to left: Davie Ryan, Banjo; Peter Rufli, flute & whistle;
Dominic Cromie, guitar and vocals Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.
In addition to the craic of old acquaintances, Doc Watson’s has very good food and pulls a decent Guinness. I particularly like their Buffalo Wings platter.
If you have not spent time in New York, you are missing the real meaning of cross-cultural fertilization. The following photos show how Chinese culture has improved upon traditions long a part of the Irish music scene:
Traditional Irish beer balancing technique Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.
Chinese improvement Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved.
Yesterday I visited Hampstead Heath, to renew my acquaintance with the magnificent view of London that you can see from there, and also to see this rather entertaining sculpture, installation, visual pun, prank, call it what you will. Basically, it is a giant table and chair. It is called “The Writer”, because your average writer uses a table and a chair when writing. Hampstead Heath was chosen by The Writer’s creator, Giancarlo Neri, because of Hampstead’s literary associations. It will be on the Heath until October.
Click on these squares to get bigger pictures:
You cannot please everybody when it comes to public sculpture. Personally, I reckon just about anything is better than the kind of meaningless lumps that used to disfigure London – in fact more or less everywhere – in the sixties and seventies, until the fashion for sculpture that is of something came roaring back. The meaningless lumps were ugly as sin, and took themselves about as seriously as a religious cult, which they were. Neri’s installations, on the other hand, have a bit of wit and fun about them, like most public sculpture these days. And if you hate it, relax. It will soon be gone. I have my photos and I am happy. You can forget about it.
I particularly like where The Writer has been put. It nestles modestly at the bottom end of Parliament Hill Fields rather than strutting its stuff at the top of Parliament Hill. From Parliament Hill you can see the top of the table (top left) the way you cannot when you are closer to it (top right).
The view through it and back up towards Parliament Hill, with all those even smaller figures on the horizon (bottom left) is a particularly nice one, I think.
The Writer makes good use of the people who flock to gaze at it. It then looks much more amusing than it would be if there were no people under or around it. The joke of how big the table and the chair are only comes alive when there are normal sized people around to dramatise it.
Inevitably, because these are the times we live in, there is a website (bottom right), although I found this BBC report more helpful.
The first choice to be faced when making a Batman film (or any other superhero film) is to whether it should be played for laughs or played straight. This Batman film tries to play it straight and I think that is the right choice. It is harder to play a superhero film straight but that is the spirit in which the stories were written and enjoyed.
Critics will not tend to like a straight superhero film (for example they hated the Bruce Willis film Unbreakable, which I would argue is a very fine film indeed), but it is the way to go, and the Spiderman films showed that critics and public can accept it (sometimes). The character of Batman is less difficult to present in one way, in that he is a superhero with no superpowers.
So one is left (in the comics) with a man of great inherited wealth, who is man of practical invention, physical action and great public spirit. Well John Walton (who died a few days ago) was a man of great inherited wealth who choose to join the army and served (as a medic) with U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam, he was also an inventor (no sneering about how he died in an aircraft he built himself – his stuff was good quality), and a man who administered the Walton family charitable activities. Of course John Walton did not go out and fight crime, in the big city, in an armoured suit shaped to scare the criminals (for a start he did not like big cities), but the rest of his life story shows that the Bruce Wayne character idea is certainly not “unbelievable”
Batman Begins decides that all of the above is too much for one man and so has Mr Wayne helped by a scientist in his company – but again that is hardly an absurd position. Where the film does stain belief is that Mr Wayne owns his company and in these days of inheritance tax and capital gains tax, having a man inherit control and keep it even after a determined effort to “take the company public” (i.e. hand over ownership to the pension funds and other financial institutions) by the hired manager… that strains belief. → Continue reading: Pondering Batman Begins
Bob ‘give-us-yer-fokken-money’ Geldof must be losing his touch:
Berlin’s planned Live8 concert next week threatens to turn into a fiasco because it has failed to attract the support of politicians or business sponsors, the event’s German organiser has admitted.
Marek Lieberberg, a friend of Bob Geldof contracted to run the Live8 concert in Berlin, said the lack of support meant the rock bands appearing at the event risked having to pay for the €1m (£663,000) show themselves.
A risk? Surely not a ‘risk’ but a heaven-sent opportunity for the socially-conscious cream of the rockeratti to put their own money where their big ‘fokken’ mouths are.
The BBC are now bingeing on Beethoven, which is fine by me. (And yes, I quite agree that if you do not care for Beethoven, you should not have to pay for it, blah blah. Let us take that as a given, shall we?)
On Saturday night BBC4 TV showed three videos of the first three symphonies, conducted by Sir Roger Norrington in One (which I missed), the late Otto Klemperer in Two (in 1960s black and white), and Rattle doing the Eroica with his old City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1995. Rattle’s Eroica was, for me, as gloriously invigorating as Klemperer’s Second was cloddish and over-solemn. Watching a very obviously heart attacked, slack-jawed Klemperer sitting like someone in a hospital waiting room waving one finger vaguely in the air while the New Philharmonia tried to divine some musical sense out of these wobbly gestures suddenly did not seem funny any more, although on another night I might have been entranced.
But Rattle’s Eroica was fabulous. All his calculatedly wide-eyed astonishment and arm-waving, armpit-flaunting drama-queening made perfect sense, given that he was conducting what is probably the single most astonishing and dramatic piece of music ever written. This is amazing, said Rattle’s every look and gesture, and it was. → Continue reading: Eroica
The Turner Prize competition has become a byword for everything that is, in the opinion of some, trashy, superficial, capricious, and utterly vacuous in today’s art world. Amazingly, it is considered a news event that an artist working in the representational tradition has actually been shortlisted to win the prize named after one of the greatest, if not the greatest, painter that Britain has ever produced.
In the meantime, for those that wonder about what has gone wrong in the art world, may I recommend this fine book about art and the theories thereon by the late Ayn Rand. I highly recommend it even to those who are not Rand fans like yours truly.
Of course, I would love it if this man won the Turner Prize, but I guess he probably does not care a hoot anyway.
The artistic version of the Labour Theory of Value is restated, at its natural home, here:
One song hails from an album that took years to craft and perfect, the delays in its conception seriously denting profits for EMI as fans across the world awaited its release. The other was obviously whipped up in a matter of minutes by a dodgy German dance act with an 80s record collection and a sampler.
Nevertheless, following the cliche that there is no accounting for taste, the Crazy Frog ringtone appears to be jumping over Coldplay’s Speed of Sound towards this week’s number one spot.
And appearances did not deceive. Yes, this was the big Frog head-to-head over the last few days. An electronic rehash of the dominant tune of Beverly Hills Cop: would it get to number one? Yes? Or no.
The samizdata.net meta-context is sometimes a bit hard to work out and apply, but in this contest, I think we all know where our sympathies lie. Do we vote for the oh-so-late album of a bunch of dreary navel-gazing complaint rockers, aimed at dreary ageing complainers (a big market, I do agree), or for a spirited up-beat can-do problems-are-there-to-be-solved need-for-speed aquatic cartoon creation? I think we know the answer to that one, don’t we girls?
Normally, I would not myself be so partial to the Crazy Frog, if only because I also quite like his deadly rival Sweety. But the Frog does seem to get up all the right noses, so all power to his legs.
Next stop for the goggled one, Korea.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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