Sunday, 13 June 2021 - 3:35pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Phil Are Go!:
- ‘Journalists’ Who Smear Assange Are Pure Scum — Caitlin Johnstone, who I wish would stop being so circumspect and just say what she thinks:
If I had written an article in a major publication claiming there was “no real reason” to believe Assange would face extradition proceedings if he left the Ecuadorian embassy, and then that claim had proved horrifyingly wrong, I personally would have done what any normal person would do and shut the entire fuck up about Julian Assange for the rest of my life. Not James Ball though. There’s a certain type of personality that guarantees it will always fail upward because it possesses a remarkable combination of power-worshipping obsequiousness, a total lack of shame, and a complete lack of scruples. It’s the same type of personality that still gets lucrative punditry work after pushing for the Iraq invasion. James Ball has no more business opining about Julian Assange than John Bolton has about the merits of interventionist foreign policy, yet both remain visible and vocal. Because they are the same kind of creature. I’m pretty good with words, but I’ve never succeeded in finding any which adequately articulate the absolute depravity of the mass media smearmeisters who’ve spent years getting paid to churn out deceitful hit pieces about Assange while he’s silenced and unable to defend himself. There’s simply no one lower. There’s shit, there’s the shit that would come out of shit if shit could shit, and then there’s people like James Ball.
- The world's greatest democracy — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
- CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them? — Will Dunn at the New Statesman:
In the longer term, as companies commit to greater automation of many roles, it's pertinent to ask whether a company needs a CEO at all. A few weeks ago Christine Carrillo, an American tech CEO, raised this question herself when she tweeted a spectacularly tone-deaf appreciation of her executive assistant, whose work allows Carrillo to “write [and] surf every day” as well as “cook dinner and read every night”. In Carrillo’s unusually frank description of the work her EA does – most of her emails, most of the work on fundraising, playbooks, operations, recruitment, research, updating investors, invoicing “and so much more” – she guessed that this unnamed worker “saves me 60% of time”. […] If most of a CEO's job can be outsourced, this suggests it could also be automated. But while companies are racing to automate entry- and mid-level roles, senior executives and decision makers show much less interest in automating themselves.
- Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
- Trump's Failed Blog Proves He Was Just Howling Into the Void — Philip M. Napoli at Wired:
As platforms like Twitter and Facebook generated massive user bases, introduced scrolling news feeds, and developed increasingly sophisticated algorithmic systems for curating and recommending content in these news feeds, they became a vital means by which online attention could be aggregated. Users evolved, or devolved, from active searchers to passive scrollers, clicking on whatever content that their friends, family, and the platforms’ news feed algorithms put in front of them. This gave rise to the still-relevant refrain “If the news is important, it will find me.” Ironically, on what had begun as the quintessential pull medium, social media users had reached a perhaps unprecedented degree of passivity in their media consumption. The leaned-back “couch potato” morphed into the hunched-over “smartphone zombie.” The failure of Trump’s blog tells us that even the kind of impassioned political extremists that form the core of Trump’s base of support are so entrenched in their passive, social-media-dependent mode of media consumption that a traditional blog, absent accompanying social media accounts to generate algorithmic amplification, is incapable of gaining a fraction of the online engagement that a single tweet could achieve. Not even the most public of public figures can break free from the platform dependency that largely dictates the distribution of audience attention online. If Trump’s blog can’t gain traction without direct access to the audience aggregation and amplification tools of social media, then perhaps nothing can.
- Rob Rogers:
- Consent-Manufacturing For Patriot Act II Continues — Caitlin Johnstone again:
As we discussed previously, Biden has often boasted of being the original author of the Patriot Act years before it was rapidly rolled out amid the fear and blind obsequiousness of the aftermath of 9/11. Now in the aftermath of the Capitol riot we are seeing a push to roll out new authoritarian laws around terrorism, this time taking aim at “domestic terror”, which were also in preparation prior to the event used to manufacture support for them. In a new article for Washington Monthly titled “It’s Time for a Domestic Terrorism Law”, Bill Scher argues against left-wing critics of the coming laws like Glenn Greenwald and Jacobin’s Luke Savage saying such “knee-jerk reactions” against potential authoritarian abuses fail to address the growing problem. He opens with the acknowledgement that “Joe Biden’s transition team was already working on a domestic terrorism law before the insurrection,” and then he just keeps on writing as though that’s not weird or suspicious in any way.
Sunday, 30 May 2021 - 8:53am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Snopes Debunked the World. Then the World Changed. — Colin Dickey in Medium:
Reading Snopes in the era of urban legends reassured us that the world wasn’t as scary as we thought, but it did more than that. Urban legends also have the capacity to generate shame. Believing them is seductive, but as soon as one is debunked, you might feel dumb and sheepish for thinking you could ever believe it in the first place. Snopes allowed us to feel superior to those who’d been duped while covering up our own gullibility. […] These days, most of the Top 50 stories on Snopes (as of this writing) are explicitly political: rumors, lies, and fabricated screenshots concerning Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi. Others are attempts to unravel the still-unfolding story of what happened on January 6, when a conspiracy theory–addled mob launched a treasonous assault on the Capitol. The site still does the work of debunking, but surfing it now is an exercise in exhaustion and dismay. […] These tales remind their listeners that the world is indeed dangerous — Democrats with their socialism, Muslims with their sharia law, Mexicans with their job-taking-what-have-you — but no longer is the message to stay at home with your family and be safe. Instead, they stoke anger, weaponize partisanship, and foster tribalism. These stories are about team-building as much as anything else. And their goal is increasingly to convince you to take to the streets and take back what’s (presumed to be) yours.
- Bored — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
- Tony Benn on Revolutionary Christianity — a lecture from 1980 republished in Tribune Magazine:
In this way a bridge was constructed that carried the message of brotherhood and sisterhood from Christianity to secular humanism, a bridge that carried the ethics across but left the creeds behind. Across this bridge there is now a growing two-way traffic of people and ideas. Christians involved in political action cross it one way. Humanists can cross it to go back to the teachings of Jesus and study them. In a theological sense there is a great divide between the Christians on one side and the humanists on the other. But it is impossible to escape the conclusion that over that bridge revolutionary ideas deriving from the Bible and the carpenter of Nazareth have spread to influence hundreds of millions of people for whom the need for neighbourly love within a common humanity is immediately apparent in a way that the mysticism, liturgies, and arid screeds may appear to be less relevant.
- Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
Sunday, 9 May 2021 - 2:48pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea — Robert P Baird in the Guardian:
As late as 1694, a slave-ship captain could still question the racial logic newly employed to justify his trade. (“I can’t think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so,” Thomas Phillips wrote in his diary.) But whiteness quickly proved itself a powerful weapon that allowed transatlantic capitalism to secure the labour – “white” and African – it needed. As the historian Theodore Allen put it, “The plantation bourgeoisie deliberately extended a privileged status to the white poor of all categories as a means of turning to African slavery as the basis of its system of production.” The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. What it meant to be white in British Virginia was not identical to what it would mean in New York before the American civil war, in India during the Raj, in Georgia during Jim Crow, in Australia after Federation, or in Germany during the Third Reich. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. As Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister and one of the most committed race ideologists of his time, put it, “race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance”.
- Is herd immunity to COVID-19 possible? Experts increasingly say no. — Elizabeth Weise at USA Today:
Last summer, the World Health Organization put the combined infection and vaccination thresholds needed to break the chain of transmission at 60% to 70%. By December, Fauci put the number for the U.S. at 75% to 85%. With the appearance of highly transmissible variants, some have bumped it to 90%. The unwillingness of some Americans to get vaccinated, however, likely has put the number out of reach. "What has surprised me most is the incomprehensible rejection of science even among otherwise intelligent people," Poland said. "I’m truly flabbergasted to be watching this on a grand scale." The split has become political. About 79% of self-identified Democrats say they have been vaccinated or intend to do so soon, compared with 46% of Republicans. About 3 in 10 Republicans say they will definitely not get vaccinated, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll. That means America could end up looking like a patchwork quilt, with areas where COVID-19 infections are low and others where the virus continues to thrive.
- Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
- Unfair Use: Anti-Interoperability and Our Dwindling Digital Freedom — Cory Doctorow in the Reboot:
When you look at how “IP” is used by firms, a very precise — albeit colloquial — meaning emerges: “IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.” That is, in a world of uncertainty, where other people’s unpredictability can erode your profits, mire you in scandal, or even tank your business, “IP” is a means of forcing other people to arrange their affairs to suit your needs, even if that undermines their own needs.
- The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you — Signal's Jun Harada:
Companies like Facebook aren’t building technology for you, they’re building technology for your data. They collect everything they can from FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility into people and their lives. […] However, Facebook’s own tools have the potential to divulge what is otherwise unseen. It’s already possible to catch fragments of these truths in the ads you’re shown; they are glimmers that reflect the world of a surveilling stranger who knows you. We wanted to use those same tools to directly highlight how most technology works. We wanted to buy some Instagram ads.
- Qualia — Cory Doctorow in Locus:
Quantitative disciplines – physics, math, and (especially) computer science – make a pretense of objectivity. They make very precise measurements of everything that can be measured precisely, assign deceptively precise measurements to things that can’t be measured precisely, and jettison the rest on the grounds that you can’t do mathematical operations on it. This is the quant’s version of the drunkard’s search for car-keys under the lamp-post: we can’t add, subtract, multiply or divide qualitative elements, so we just incinerate them, sweep up the dubious quantitative residue that remains, do math on that, and simply assert that nothing important was lost in the process.
Number Nine, Number Nine…
I swore I'd never go back to web development. I can pinpoint the precise moment.
I was fat, prematurely old, bald, grey bearded, and dancing up and down the hall in my underpants with the phone pressed to my ear, explaining to a "mate's rates" client why the impossible things he was asking for were impossible. It was made all the more infuriating by the fact that this client fancied himself a guru, boasted of his mastery of the dark arts of awk, sed, and groff, and insisted that he sought my assistance only because his time was so in demand elsewhere.
So while he was insisting that he didn't understand why I was being so difficult, and that it should be trivial to create a totally secure system that didn't require his users to supply an email address or remember a password, I lost my rag.
I can't even remember how I resolved that situation. I think I might have given him his deposit back. But I did resolve to call it a day, prise my web developers' shingle from the wall, and dither about for a while.
Dithering about was no less lucrative, and much better for my health, but there's no fighting age, and lately my body has started falling to bits, so suddenly minimum wage physical labour seems less viable. I find myself thinking where's the harm in looking at what's been going on since I've been away?
It's true I spent a miserable decade trying to be a tech entrepreneur in a small town where the prospective client base had a serious problem with literacy. Not technical literacy; I mean just reading and writing.
The only people who around here who can spell are the very many extremely busy tattoo artists, and even that proficiency is limited to names like "Sienna" or "Kaiden".
It's all very endearing to declare a devotion to one's offspring so indelibly, but surely there are times — during moments of consensual physical intimacy, for example — where one doesn't want to be taken out of the moment by a list of offspring running across a pair of shoulder blades or down a hairy forearm. Or maybe the thought of one's rampant fecundity contributes to the mood. Eww. Suburbia is sick. I digress.
I did enjoy becoming quite proficient at my trade, despite the lack of good it did me, and also the camaraderie of the Drupal community. Perhaps if I were to broaden my sights beyond Mount-Druitt-by-the-Sea, I might find this a trade I could ply from the comfort of my cat-drawn bath chair well into my dotage.
So I've decided to dip my arthritic old toes back into the water by migrating my old Drupal 7 personal website to Drupal 9. The plan is to migrate rather than upgrade in place. I would be creating a new, functionally equivalent and/or superior, site and copying the content (such as it is) over. Upgrading, at a distance of this many years is out of the question.
Preparing Your Work Surface
I'm going to start with a development site on my local computer and than try to use modern best practice to deploy on my Linode server.
Well, this is embarrassing. Surprisingly, my days as an IT professional comfortably predate the purchase of my now-rusting hulk of a desktop PC. It doesn't even have Apache on it. And all my work documentation, including my LAMP install checklist was on a long-gone Drupal site. I'm a hoarder, and don't often burn my bridges, but when I do I always regret it.
So, I'm going to have to remember/relearn all this:
# apt-get install apache
# apt-get install php
# apt-get install mariadb-server mariadb-client
And I at least get the Debian Apache placeholder page:
Look how lovely and calming it is. It should never change. I think I want it on my grave stone. It says, in essense, "Don't feel sad or anxious. Everything is alright."
Surprisingly, Moore's Law has caught up with Drupal, and so Debian 10's default PHP memory allotment is fine. Nevertheless I know I'm going to have to tweak limits when I get to coping with image files, so to pre-empt the urge to hack php.ini:
# cd /etc/php
# touch local.ini
# ln -s /etc/php/local.ini /etc/php/7.3/apache2/conf.d/10-local.ini
So any custom settings go in /etc/php/local.ini, and when PHP is upgraded, I just have to remember to create another symlink of my custom settings for the new version, rather than be prompted to investigate changes to php.ini on every `apt-get dist-upgrade`. (Who doesn't just cross their fingers and opt to keep the current version whenever that happens?)
Composer
I'm a Debian person. I like installing software from Debian via apt. I don't like installing binaries from tarballs, much less compiling from source. Really uncomfortable about the idea of layering another package management system on top of apt.
That said, Composer now does the package management for Drupal modules that was hitherto done by our own command line Swiss Army knife, drush. Why reinvent the wheel when you can hand that job over to something that the wider PHP developer community is already using? I'm okay with that.
Also, why not use Composer to install Drupal itself? Yeah… okay.
Debian 10 ships with Composer v1. When you try to use that to install anything, the package repository fires off a warning message, and because I'm skittish, I comply, and manually install Composer v2 according to instructions. With one wrinkle: anything I install that hasn't come from an apt package repository, I put in /opt and symlink the executable to /usr/bin. That way, I always know that anything I use which came from a from a source not in /etc/apt/sources.list can be found there. I love a bit of en passant documentation.
Drupal 9
As I said, I no longer have my old notes, and the official Drupal documentation (which is a mess; some things never change - at least not for the better) mostly refers to Drupal 8 rather than Drupal 9. This isn't quite the offense it seems to be at first glance, as due to Drupal's new continuous upgrades policy, Drupal 9 is just Drupal 8 minus deprecated code. New features get added incrementally with each minor version release, so there is no vast chasm of incompatibility between Drupal 8 and 9 (or later) as there was between Drupal 7 and 8 (and earlier).
So I decide to sally forth in total ignorance with the intention of remedying deficiencies in system requirements as and when they arise, thus:
$ cd /var/www
$ composer create-project drupal/recommended-project local.mjd.id.au
[…]
drupal/core 9.1.7 requires ext-dom * -> it is missing from your system. Install or enable PHP's dom extension.
Okay, so:
# apt-get install php-xml$ composer create-project drupal/recommended-project local.mjd.id.au
[…]
drupal/core 9.1.7 requires ext-gd * -> it is missing from your system. Install or enable PHP's gd extension.
Right, I'm fed up with this already. I go back to the documentation to find the PHP modules I need for a basic install and:
# apt install php-gd
# apt install php-curl
# apt install php-mbstring
Now:
$ composer create-project drupal/recommended-project local.mjd.id.au
[…]
Congratulations, you’ve installed the Drupal codebase
from the drupal/recommended-project template!
And sure enough, there's a whole mess o' Drupal in /var/www now. Awesome. Just need an empty database and some Apache configuration.
PHPMyAdmin didn't make it into Debian 10, for some reason, though it is in testing/unstable.
I can't be doing with composing my own SQL queries. My brain is stubbornly multi-dimensional, and refuses to serialise. I love that SQL exists in ubiquity, and admire people who live and prosper in a world of LEFT INNER JOINs and so on, but it's not for me. Not to worry, Debian Backports to the rescue, so I can now create an empty database without breaking my brain.
I'm almost certain that the documentation on drupal.org used to have a sample Apache virtual host configuration template, but I'm blowed if I can find it, so I cheat and copy from my current site. What I put in /etc/apache2/sites-available/local.mjd.id.au.conf looks something like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>ServerAdmin me@my.domainServerName local.mjd.id.auRewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^local.mjd.id.au [NC]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://local.mjd.id.au/$1 [L,R]DocumentRoot /var/www/local.mjd.id.au/web<Directory />Options FollowSymLinksAllowOverride None</Directory><Directory /var/www/local.mjd.id.au/web>RewriteEngine onRewriteBase /RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-fRewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-dRewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViewsAllowOverride AllOrder allow,denyallow from all</Directory>ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.logLogLevel warnCustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combinedServerSignature On</VirtualHost>
Then it's:
# a2enmod rewrite
# a2ensite local.mjd.id.au
# systemctl restart apache2
And I can finally fire up a web browser and go through the familiar Drupal web install process. I opt for the "minimal" install, which is no exaggeration:
That is well minimal. This is the new "Stark" theme, which does not fail to live up to its name.
Switching to the new "Olivero" theme feels a bit more comfortable:
Still, I can't get around without the trusty old Admin Toolbar module so let's have Composer download that for us:
$ composer require drupal/admin_toolbar
Using version ^3.0 for drupal/admin_toolbar
./composer.json has been updated
Running composer update drupal/admin_toolbar
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies
Lock file operations: 1 install, 0 updates, 0 removals
- Locking drupal/admin_toolbar (3.0.0)
Writing lock file
Installing dependencies from lock file (including require-dev)
Package operations: 1 install, 0 updates, 0 removals
- Downloading drupal/admin_toolbar (3.0.0)
- Installing drupal/admin_toolbar (3.0.0): Extracting archive
Package doctrine/reflection is abandoned, you should avoid using it. Use roave/better-reflection instead.
Generating autoload files
Using the web UI, I enable that module and also the Claro administrative theme and holy cow, this is starting to look like Drupal:
Drush
While I can now install bits of Drupal with Composer, I'm still missing the ability to actually enable/disable/configure those bits from the command line. For that I need Drush, which sounds like a yeast infection, but I think originally implied "Drupal shell":
$ composer require drush/drush
Drush now lives as a per-site instance under the Drupal root as vendor/bin/drush, which is a pain to type, so there's a wrapper script which will find the the instance appropriate to your current working directory:
# cd /opt
# wget https://github.com/drush-ops/drush-launcher/releases/latest/download/drush.phar
# chmod 755 drush.phar
# ln -s /opt/drush.phar /usr/bin/drush
So now I can go:
$ drush status
Drupal version : 9.1.7
Site URI : http://default
DB driver : mysql
DB hostname : localhost
DB port : 3306
DB username : mjdidau
DB name : mjdidau
Database : Connected
Drupal bootstrap : Successful
Default theme : olivero
Admin theme : claro
PHP binary : /usr/bin/php7.3
PHP config : /etc/php/7.3/cli/php.ini
PHP OS : Linux
Drush script : /opt/drush.phar
Drush version : 10.4.3
Drush temp : /tmp
Drush configs : /var/www/local.mjd.id.au/vendor/drush/drush/drush.yml
Install profile : minimal
Drupal root : /var/www/local.mjd.id.au/web
Site path : sites/default
Files, Public : sites/default/files
Files, Temp : /tmp
The full list of drush commands used to be had via `drush help`. I always derived some degree of confessional satisfaction from regularly typing `drush help|less`. `drush help` is now reserved for getting help on a particular command; to see all currently-available commands, one must use `drush list`, which when paginated is also quite appropriate.
There are approximately two people on the planet who will be astonished to find from the above that I'm installing a site in sites/default. I was always an advocate for Drupal's multisite capacity; the ability to run multiple websites from a single Drupal install, all sharing the same codebase, core and "contributed" modules and themes. You'd have each site's files, custom modules or themes sitting under sites/sitename.com.
In principle it sounds wonderful. In practice, it never quite worked. Imagine upgrading two sites at once. Then imagine upgrading a dozen sites at once. I never had, for instance, one single Drupal 6 instance. I had a Drupal 6.0 instance and a Drupal 6.1, and a Drupal 6.2, and so on, and I would shift sites one by one up the ladder as necessity dictated.
Ironically, the new Drupal versioning/upgrading regime makes that dream more realistic, but Moore's law has caught up. Server space is so much cheaper than the cost of even my labour that the most trivial website can afford the overhead of all those files it could easily be sharing with others.
That overhead is not trivial. In terms of disk usage, this new, entirely content-free website, currently looks like this:
$ du -chs *4.0K composer.json224K composer.lock38M vendor128M web166M total
A hundred and sixty-six meg of nothing is pretty extreme. Better start adding some content, I suppose…
RMS FSF
I've occasionally described my experience of life as like seeing everything through the wrong end of a telescope. For some reason, things that ought to have affected me just didn't, and conversely I couldn't see any way of influencing what went on way over there in the little dot of light at the far end of the telescope.
As a child, I quickly discovered that my peers consequently found me offensive and ridiculous. I worked around this by climbing trees and living in a pretty solitary fantasy world.
As an adult, I discovered alcohol and - BOOM! - the telescope collapsed and suddenly other people were right there around me, for the most part perfectly comprehensible, and indeed I became rather fond of some of them.
Sitting in the pub after work, with my ever-present pile of magazines and books, I read about this hot new thing called "High-Fuctioning Autism" (later "Asperger's Syndrome", then demoted to merely a position on the "Autism Spectrum"), and also much about the supposed introvert/extrovert dichotomy.
Whenever I suggested to somebody that I might be a bit introverted or "Asperger's", this suggestion was met with incredulity: "What? You?!"
I'm a better human being when I'm drinking a lot. Not, I must stress, when I'm drunk. Rather when whatever my brain does to keep me distant from everything around me has been disabled by regular doses of alcohol. I understand what people feel. Occasionally I even know what to say to them. I can be relatively sober and be overwhelmed by Platonic love. It's extraordinary and wonderful.
By my mid-twenties I moderated my alcohol intake. It now waxes and wanes, but to be honest, I wish I could do without self-medication altogether. I look in the mirror and see somebody simultaneously much younger and much older than I am. Brings to mind William S. Burroughs' phrase "borrowed flesh". I wish that there was some way that I could be close to people that doesn't involve blasting my brain with a toxic chemical.
I don't have many heroes. At last count it was two, maybe three. (You only acquire heroes when you're young, and some of them quickly lose their lustre.)
Ever since my teenage years, I felt as if there were a filmy curtain separating me from other people my age. I understood the words of their conversations, but I could not grasp why they said what they did. Much later I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to.
Richard Matthew Stallman changed my life. Previously I understood all paid work as transactional. You do something you find distasteful, but you're compensated for it. The idea of pursuing a trade ethically, with dignity and self-respect, was astonishing.
I can't imagine what it's like to be born looking at life down the wrong end of the telescope, and not to have alcohol to fix it. RMS doesn't drink. I am not ashamed to admit that collapsing the telescope by sheer intellectual effort is beyond me.
That doesn't excuse several instances of inconsiderate behaviour, but I'm standing in a very shaky glass house, so I'm not going to throw any stones. Motes and beams and all that.
Sunday, 11 April 2021 - 11:24am
Lately, I have been mostly reading:
- The Past and Future of Political Economy — Jamie Galbraith reviews The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky for American Affairs:
The gold standard and the quantity theory of money have been succeeded in our day by rational expectations theory and dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modeling (don’t ask), and by their policy stepchild, inflation targeting. These are the doctrines of repute and respectability, the touchstones of academic and professional advancement in our time. They share an almost eschatological preoccupation with the condition of things in the long run—the economists’ version of the prophets’ paradise to come—and a willingness to absorb (or more accurately to inflict) pain and punishment in the present. Economists in this respect are unlike modern doctors. The arsenals of pain relief and fever reduction play little role in their toolkit—and where they do (“stimulus programs”) they are often treated as having long-term costs that offset the benefits in the short term. Our social doctors generally prefer to let events take their course, on the assumption that the patient always recovers. If intervention is indispensable, they say, then let it be surgery without anesthesia, so that the patient will remember next time that it is better not to get sick.
- Life Before the Pandemic — xkcd by Randall Muroe:
- Global Vaccine Equity Is Much More Important Than ‘Vaccine Passports’ — Steven W. Thrasher in Scientific American:
I am a much bigger fan of creating global vaccine equity—by breaking intellectual property patents if necessary—to suppress the level of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in as many humans as possible as quickly as possible across borders than I am a fan of creating vaccine passports that only allow those with the privilege of getting a vaccine to cross borders. Borders in some countries are currently being used to determine who does and doesn’t get a vaccine. It would be even more unethical to use those borders to bar the movement of people who have been denied vaccination. As Stefan David Baral, Jean Olivier Twahirwa Rwema and Nancy Phaswana-Mafuya recently wrote in the BMJ, “being a citizen of certain countries grants people access to nearly the entire globe, whereas others face challenges just to legally leave the borders of the country they live in, even during times of conflict.” Not coincidentally, people in high-earning-income countries also have much greater access to vaccines than those in poorer countries with less mobility. But the idea that one “needs” to go on vacation or attend an academic conference abroad at this point in the pandemic is morally unjustifiable. This is especially true if you are traveling to or from a place where you know others do not have access to vaccines—and you want a special piece of paper proving that you do, which would allow you to cross the border.
- Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
- How Workers Really Get Canceled on the Job — Nathan Newman in the American Prospect:
In her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about being given a personality test when interviewing for a housecleaning job, which asked such questions as whether “management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals.” She also described alarming the tester for Walmart, by asserting some measure of independence on a couple of questions. Ehrenreich’s working-class job seeker was among the real victims of cancel culture in the U.S., not A-list writers and actors. For decades, millions of workers have been rejected for employment based solely on their answers to pre-employment personality tests administered by corporate America. Instead of social media mobs, inscrutable algorithms silently delete people from interview callbacks, without their résumé even being seen by a human being. And make no mistake, rooting out dissent is the primary goal of these hiring algorithms.
- Bizarro — by Wayno and Pirarro:
- North Carolina Republicans Want to Punish Gender Thoughtcrime — Sarah Jones in New York Magazine:
In the race to stigmatize trans children, North Carolina Republicans have pulled ahead. If passed, Senate Bill 514 wouldn’t just ban people under the age of 21 from getting the transition health care they need, it would also require state employees to out trans and queer children to their parents. If a child displays “symptoms of gender dysphoria, gender nonconformity, or otherwise demonstrates a desire to be treated in a manner incongruent with the minor’s sex,” they must notify the child’s parents or guardians, the legislation mandates. Legislators in other states have proposed bills that would, similarly, prevent trans children from getting medically necessary care. North Carolina, however, is innovative. Co-sponsoring legislators have in essence devised a way to punish gender thoughtcrime. The bill is broad, and could affect tomboys and trans kids alike. A person’s definition of “gender nonconformity” depends first on their conception of gender — of what’s normal, and what isn’t.
- Who The #Resistance Was Actually #Resisting These Last Four Years — Caitlin Johnstone in/on Medium:
The Resistance™️ was aggressively marketed by cynical liberal spinmeisters like Neera Tanden (who in a brazen middle finger to US progressives is also set to play a role in the Biden administration) with the goal of harnessing and maintaining the enthusiastic grassroots anti-establishment energy of the Bernie Sanders campaign and directing it against Trump. But what did it actually accomplish? In the end, all the so-called Resisters ended up doing was promoting a bunch of Russia conspiracy theories and an impeachment which failed to remove Trump, all while providing no actual resistance to Trump’s most pernicious policies. […] This is because the #Resistance was never actually intended to resist the evil agendas of the powerful, nor even to resist Trump. The #Resistance was not created to resist the powerful, it was created to resist you. The grassroots anti-establishment populism of the Bernie Sanders movement was cynically imitated by the Democratic establishment to ensure that the establishment is never inconvenienced in any way, and that progressives never take power in America.
Why You Should Go to the Mundi Mundi Bash
I didn't know that there was such a thing as the Mundi Mundi Bash until my friend Ruben alerted me, but if you are in the neighbourhood of Broken Hill, NSW, Australia (which effectively means you are in Broken Hill; there is no neighbourhood), here is why you should (or should not) go to that particular music festival.
Paul Kelly - Before Too Long (Official Video)
When I was in high school, Matt Handley had a three-piece band, but needed a rhythm guitarist for this one song. He gave me a cassette and a handwritten page with chords on it. I didn't pass the audition, as I could be a bit clever with musical instruments, but I didn't really understand how music worked.
I love the video for this, as it's central Sydney as I remember it. Run-down and seedy. No glass-fronted Apple or Nike stores or high-rise apartments. Just office blocks, pubs, and subterranean dive bars where men in beige suits and wide ties would go to forestall the awful moment when they had to take the train home.
Paul Kelly - Dumb Things (Official Video)
By god, that's catchy. Nobody has the right to write a song that catchy.
Paul Kelly - Darling It Hurts
Feck me. There he goes again.
Tim Finn (in Split Enz - My Mistake 1977)
How the feck something so self-consciously arty made it into the Australian top ten, I have no idea. It was colourful, and it wasn't punk. Or was it? Or was it not wasn't it? Wasn't it? Hmm? Oh. My mistake.
Split Enz - I Hope I Never (1980)
This video was routinely used as filler on the ABC when shows ran under time. Not a ringing endorsement, but it means it's in the cultural DNA, and it's too late to get it out now.
Split Enz - Pioneer / Six Months In A Leaky Boat (1982)
On high rotation on my work musak. I don't care. Always makes me happy.
Tim Finn - Fraction Too Much Friction (1983)
It's 80s as all get out, but in a nice way. Love it.
Crowded House - Chocolate Cake
I can't say it enough: New Zealand is Australia's Ireland; it's where all our smart and talented people come from. Tim invited his brother Neil (observing proper NZ pronunciation, that is to say "Tum" and "Nil", respectively) to join Split Enz. When Neil's band Crowded House ran dry of songs for a third album, he returned the favour, and Tim became a temporary Crowdie. I can't help thinking this song is either mostly Tim, or the two of them egging each other on. Very bloody satirical.
Kate Ceberano - Young Boys Are My Weakness 1989
Yup. Well, that was a thing. She's a session muso. Back in the days when I had testosterone, I thought she was pretty talented. Revising that opinion.
Kate Ceberano & Wendy Matthews - You've Always Got The Blues (1988)
In the late 80s, television became about "production values". At the time I was terribly keen about this, but ultimately it led to a transition from good writing and wobbly sets to good sets and wobbly writing. Case in point: the series that spawned this recording is long forgotten.
Daddy Cool - Eagle Rock - Clip (1971)
I think Ross Wilson and his one hit wonder band knocked "My Sweet Lord" off the top of the Australian hit parade in the year I was born. I always wondered whether John Lennon heard the song. I think he would have appreciated the sheer silliness of it.
Mondo Rock - Cool World (1981)
Ross Wilson's less evanescent band demonstrates why the eighties have that reputation.
Mondo Rock - Come Said The Boy (1984)
This makes a bit of sick rise up at the back of my throat. Also, it's a dead-set Aussie classic. Which speaks volumes.
Black Sorrows - Chained to the wheel - Original 1989 video
I love the album. This band would be nothing without Vika and Linda Bull. Everything they touch turns to gold. They are the real thing, not the Kate and Wendy.
Paul Kelly with Vika & Linda Bull - 'What You Want' + 'Thank You' [HD] The Music Show, ABC RN
I have tears streaming down my cheeks.
Sunday, 21 February 2021 - 12:12pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
- People with ‘gay-sounding’ voices face discrimination and anticipate rejection — Carrie Woods in the Academic Times reviews a recent paper in the field of stupid men studies:
The research highlighted that essentialist beliefs about homosexuality can result in “auditory gaydar,” or the use of vocal cues to infer someone else’s sexual orientation. Whether or not an individual “sounded gay” resulted in different levels of prejudice and avoidant discrimination. […] The findings show that “sounding gay” is something that still carries a significant stigma, especially for men. The men who believed that they “sounded gay” reported higher levels of vigilance regarding their voice, which is something that can create stress in their lives, Fasoli said.
- The Nightmare Is Finally Over, and We Can Say with Absolute Certainty That There Will Never Be Another Death Star Ever Again — Madeleine Trebenski and the pop culture metaphor that never gets old at McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
Our reports state that, at the time of the attack, the Emperor was playing golf at his resort in Canto Bight, but has since retreated to the farthest reaches of the Outer Rim. He continues to send out communications claiming that he won The Battle of the Death Star, even though flaming chunks of debris from the former moon-sized battle station are currently raining down on nearby planets. Try not to take his refusal to acknowledge defeat and his vow to never relinquish supreme power too seriously. In the wake of our victory, his regime and all of the anti-republic support he has stirred up over the last few years will surely fade back into the dark corners of space from whence they came. There’s no reason to believe that his followers will quietly nurse their hatred in the shadows and commence rebuilding a second Death Star the minute we become complacent and return to the status quo.
- Facecrook: Dealing with a Global Menace — Matt Stoller explains why the new Australian law isn't a "link tax":
The law says that if you are a dominant digital platform, then you have an obligation to engage in good faith bargaining with news outlets whose content you distribute over the terms of that distribution. The law only applies if there is a bargaining imbalance with media outlets. So this isn’t a tax, it is an anti-monopoly law. […] The idea behind the law is to mimic a healthy market, where there is transparency of data and a robust set of buyers and sellers instead of a few dominant platforms. […] In other words, despite what Facebook’s PR armies are saying, it isn’t a link tax, it is an anti-monopoly law that Facebook is opposing because the law will undermine the firm’s ability to monopolize the ad market and force transparency in how the firm gathers and manages its vast data horde. […] Facebook’s response to this law was to flex some serious muscles, and block the sharing of news in Australia on its platform. Doing so was a disaster, at least PR-wise, because it revealed how much power Facebook really has. The social media monopolist lost credibility globally, with Canadian and UK politicians attacking the firm as a bad faith actor. Facebook even lost American support; as late as last month, the United States Trade Representative was supporting the company against Australia’s law, but the American government seems to have switched course, and is now neutral. It’s now only a matter of time before Facebook is broken up and regulated.
- Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
- “I Don’t Trust the People Above Me”: Riot Squad Cops Open Up About Disastrous Response to Capitol Insurrection — Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan in ProPublica:
Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters. “We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’” By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day. “We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”
- Cold Truth: The Texas Freeze is a Catastrophe of the Free Market — Jamie Galbraith for INET:
In 2002, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas deregulated its electricity system. […] The market system could, and did, work out most of the time. Prices rose and fell, and customers who didn’t sign long-term contracts faced some risk. […] The problem with “most of the time” is that people need electric power all of the time. And Texas’s leaders knew as of 2011, at least, when the state went through a short, severe freeze, that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather. But they did nothing. To do something, they would have had to regulate the system. And they didn’t want to regulate the system, because the providers, a rich source of campaign funding, didn’t want to be regulated and to have to spend on weatherization that was not needed – most of the time. In 2020, even voluntary inspections were suspended, due to Covid-19.
- It’s Always The Same Lie — Kelsey McKinney in Defector (some kind of sports blog, apparently):
Americans are being failed in every state. They are dying and suffering while our representatives are arguing over whether to give us 1,400 more dollars in the 11th month of a pandemic. Every level of the United States government is lying to you right now. They are looking you dead in the eye as your family members freeze and cough and drown in debt and telling you that, actually, you’re fine. “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” former Texas Governor Rick Perry said in a blog posted on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s website. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.” Current Texas Governor Greg Abbott went on Fox News to place the blame for Texas’s blackouts on green energy sources, and to wield the grid’s failure as a dire warning against the Green New Deal. He was lying, the same way Andrew Cuomo lied when he wrote an entire book about his masterful leadership through the coronavirus pandemic while 15,000 New Yorkers died in nursing homes as a direct result of his policies. He was lying the same way Barack Obama lied when he went to Flint in 2018 and pretended to take a sip of water in front of an outraged community.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
Sunday, 7 February 2021 - 5:05pm
In the last few months, I have been mostly reading newspaper headlines:
- Remembering Robert Fisk — Ian Williams in Tribune:
Having braved the sectarian battles of Belfast, Fisk was prepared for the bitter conflicts he covered when he reported from Beirut over so many years. He brought a sense of history that Western media pundits on drop-in visit tend to lack, the cable and internet sock-puppets pontificating from faraway studios. Not least of his assets was that he lived in the region and spoke Arabic – and did so directly to ordinary people. A consummate beat reporter, he cultivated local sources even as he listened carefully to what official sources said. To report on the region, he advised, “we journalists have to fight the Trumps as well as the Arab dictators, the pro-Israeli lobbyists and the Muslim factions and sometimes, yes again, tolerate the anger of our colleagues.” […] But Fisk was always the maverick, prepared to blaze his own trail. He would not profess the spurious objectivity so often honoured in the breach by the media of record. He said that journalism must “challenge authority, all authority, especially so when governments and politicians take us to war.” When most of the media were being rounded up to support the Iraq War, Fisk was among the who not only saw the transparent absurdity of the WMD evidence, but also detailed the massive support Britain and the US had given to Saddam Hussein – which is why, he suggested, the Iraqi leader was quickly hanged to prevent him revealing his persecutors’ complicity.
- Facebook Forced Its Employees To Stop Discussing Trump's Coup Attempt — Ryan Mac at Buzzfeed:
Facebook employees were appalled by President Donald Trump’s encouragement of his supporters as they stormed the US Capitol building on Wednesday to prevent the ratification of a free and fair election. The employees were scared and frustrated, and some came to the realization that the platform they had helped build and operate had contributed to the wave of fear, disinformation, and chaos that flooded Congress. So they spoke out on an internal message board, and some called for Trump’s removal from the platform. In less than an hour, Facebook moved to silence them. Without any apparent explanation, administrators froze comments on at least three threads in which employees had discussed removing Trump from the site.
- Honey, Do We Need Soap This Expensive? - Maynard Blarvin — Phil Are Go!:
- Everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation: An ongoing list — Jillian C. York:
First of all, the only “precedent” set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company. I suppose that if your entire worldview is what happens in the United States, you might be surprised. But were you took outside that narrow lens, you would see that Facebook has booted off Lebanese politicians, Burmese generals, and even other right-wing US politicians…nevermind the millions of others who have been booted by these platforms, often without cause, often while engaging in protected speech under any definition. 2020 alone saw the (wrongful, even in light of platform policies) deplatforming of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people using terms related to Iran (including a Los Angeles-based crafter’s “Persian dolls” by Etsy) in an overzealous effort by companies to comply with sanctions; the booting of Palestinian speakers from Zoom on incorrectly-analyzed legal grounds; the deplatforming by Twitter of dozens of leftist Jews and Palestinians for clapping back at harassers, and so much more.
- The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage — Katherine Stewart in the New York Times:
In multiple speeches, an interview and a widely shared article for Christianity Today, Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius — a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at the King’s College, a small conservative Christian college devoted to “a biblical worldview,” Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines. […] The line of thought here is starkly binary and nihilistic. It says that human existence in an inevitably pluralistic, modern society committed to equality is inherently worthless. It comes with the idea that a right-minded elite of religiously pure individuals should aim to capture the levers of government, then use that power to rescue society from eternal darkness and reshape it in accord with a divinely approved view of righteousness.
- Q-Nuts: "It's the Great Storm, Charlie Brown" — Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling:
- Ed-Tech and Trauma — Audrey Watters:
The reporter asked me "what if we could build an AI that didn't have any privacy or security issues, that didn't have any bias?" And I argued with her that that was absolutely the wrong way to think about this. What if, for example, someone built an online proctoring tool that was bias-free, privacy-respecting, and absolutely secure? Well, I'd say that it would be impossible, but sure, okay. What if? It would still be a terrible idea because online proctoring is carceral pedagogy — that is, a pedagogy that draws on beliefs and practices that echo those of prisons — surveillance, punishment, and too often literal incarceration. Carceral pedagogy is the antithesis of education as a practice of freedom. And carceral pedagogy is deeply traumatizing.
2020 Mixtape: Strings, Lockdown, Strong Women, and Whales
Probably about [squints a bit, rubs chin] four years ago a friend of my [then-]wife invited us to a nineteen-eighties-themed birthday party. For the previous few years I'd been assembling playlists of music videos, mostly from YouTube, to play during the traditionally festive bit at the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Together with getting out the turntable and dusting off the vinyl, jigsaw puzzles, Trivial Pursuit, Uno, and insane amounts of food and booze, a splendid time was generally had, under the circumstances.
So as we were too skint to shell out for an appropriately lavish gift for a round-numbered birthday, my wife suggested I put together an eighties-themed video playlist on a USB drive. It was tremendous fun finding and downloading the videos (for any young people who may be reading, "downloading" is just like streaming, only deleting the data you've just downloaded isn't mandatory). Where previously I'd just played the videos through my RaspberryPi plugged into the telly, this time after downloading with youtube-dl, I edited (most topping and tailing) the clips when necessary in OpenShot, checked the audio in Audacity to see how much it should be amplified to keep each track at more or less the same level (no, I've not found any satisfactory way of automating this), then applying the amplification and transcoding to H264 MPEG with HandBrake, so that you could stick a USB stick into any telly made in the last ten years and it would play.
It was so much fun that I extended my remit beyound the eighties and started doing the same thing every year. I'm less fussy about the format/codec now, as I don't have a telly (these days nobody does; they're just computers you don't really control, with a huge monitor and a very bad UI), so I just leave it in the format/codec I found it wherever possible.
This year — no relatives, not much food, still plenty of booze — I set about doing the same. Having exhausted the obvious back-catalogue stuff it's a smaller show than in the past, and I'm a month behind schedule. It's mostly little novelties that I've stumbled across in the last twelve months, plus nostalgic things that they brought to mind. You can download the whole thing here, for as long as I have the server space, or follow the YouTube links below until the sources are taken down.
Here's the list:
The Pogues: Dirty Old Town (A Snippet Thereof)
Can't start without the Pogues. Found a few old clips while down some rabbit hole or other last year. Would love to know the source of this one, beyond "somebody's VHS collection". Really encapsulates MacGowan's punk attitude to music at a point in the Pogues trajectory where the success they'd had didn't interfere with his preferred lifestyle; no barriers between performer and audience, and a sheepish indifference to his own talent.
The Trashcan Sinatras: Obscurity Knocks
In the late eighties and early nineties, my old school chum Paul used to drive up from his family's semi-rural property to my family's utterly-suburban home once a week. We'd order pizza and consume vast quantities of cola to the point where I swear I could feel the sugar slurry moving through my veins. Until the not-so-wee hours of the morning we'd talk nonsense and watch Rage, where this video was one of several on high rotatation at the time. A gorgeous song and a video that perfectly suits it, but doesn't define it.
Courtney Barnett: Pedestrian at Best
Stumbled across the official video for this single on a forum somewhere and immediately thought "This is great! Simple, relentless, like the Fall!" As it happens, this song is a bit of an outlier, and most of her stuff is more in the standard Oz Alternative vein. Still, I like that as well, so no harm done. This live rendition is a bit nearer Nirvana than the Fall. Which — also — is nice.
I'm fascinated by the way she plays guitar, since the way I play (well, used to play) is to treat the whole enterprise as mainly an aerobic workout, and if all the frantic thrashing about sounds okay, that's a bonus. Seeing her get that big sound out of lightly brushing the strings, and realising "Oh, yeah. Electric amplification…"
The Stranglers - Golden Brown
Some transitions between songs are because one naturally follows from another. Others are because it's a jarringly discordant wake-up. Still others are just your brain telling you "I want to listen to this one next".
This song was on the EMI (Australia) various artists compilation album 1982 with a Bullet, which we had in our house as kids. In the nineties, when I was living in Oscar's Palace, I was messing about on my guitar with chord progressions and suddenly thought "Oh! That sounds like…", and did the same few chords in waltz time. And yes, my entire life is basically nostalgia for times that don't really warrant it.
Putting together the original 80s playlist, I couldn't find a source for the official video, so I used a far less satisfying Top of the Pops mime performance. This will be not the last callback to earlier playlists (which I may also put online if I'm ever less work-shy).
Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over
Spirit-raising remote lockdown renditions of beloved songs: didn't you love these in 2020?
Maybe not entirely, but still it's Crowded House. Well, it's Neil and Nick. Plus fun fact: the "catch a deluge in a paper cup" line was a conscious nod to Lennon's "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup" from Across the Universe. Bet you didn't know that. Read it in the early nineties in an interview with Neil in one of those music papers that used to give you black fingertips.
Steve Martin (with The Philadelphia Orchestra): Office Supplies
Spirit-raising remote lockdown renditions of things you've never heard before…
I think The Jerk is one of the greatest films of all time, and I'm delighted by Steve Martin's quite substantive musical career in recent years.
I bought a banjo about twenty years ago, hoping to emulate Jem Finer from the Pogues. Turns out it's a very loud instrument, with no volume control. Not quite as bad as bagpipes or the saxophone, but not recommended for anybody who likes to reach a certain level of proficiency in complete privacy.
Still have it. Barely played. Make an offer.
The Dick Cavett Show: Little Richard On Discovering The Beatles
Good golly, Miss Molly. RIP, the king and queen of rock and roll.
The Beatles (Live At The Festival Hall in Melbourne): Long Tall Sally
Ringo had just recovered from a serious bout of tonsilitis. Thought you might want to know that.
Using FFmpeg, you can fix the aspect ratio without re-encoding and losing quality. Which is nice.
David Byrne (Live on Saturday Night Live): Once in a Lifetime
This has already been yanked from YouTube. It's a performance from the American Utopia stage show which Spike Lee filmed and you can probably get from various informal distribution channels. How on earth taking this off YouTube might be to the benefit of Byrne, the producers of SNL, the stage production, or anybody even remotely associated with all the above, is a mystery to me. Monopolists got to monop, I suppose.
Happy Mondays: Sunshine and Love
The Mondays' last proper album is an unappreciated gem. The conventional wisdom about it is total bollocks.
They didn't bankrupt Factory, Factory bankrupted itself and was waiting, unreasonably, for the Mondays to come to the rescue.
The Mondays were always a producer's band, and after a cracking couple of albums with first John Cale and then Martin Hannett producing, they had their mainstream hit with Paul Oakenfold, which to me landed like a wet sock. It was so of its time that it was dated by the day of its release, and so polished that you can listen to it over and over and not feel a thing.
Yes Please! was a return to form, with Chris Franz and Tina Weymouth (from Talking Heads) putting the welly back into the mix.
Unfortunately the NME and Melody Maker, having decided how music was going to go in the nineties and finding that the Mondays no longer fit, elected to put the boot in. Because obviously Northside was the horse to bet on.
Divinyls: Hey Little Boy
Did Chrissy Amphlett make sexy scary, or make scary sexy? Anyway, an Australian band that broke into the mainstream without losing brains or edge.
My friend Paul and I saw the Divinyls at the State Theatre in Sydney about thirty years ago. Brilliant.
I love the State theatre, but it was the wrong venue for that band. The seats were totally redundant from five minutes in.
R.E.M.: Nightswimming
Fediverse chum @andyc brought this clip to my attention last year. It's a beautiful thing.
This song is occasionally on the musak playlist at work. I don't care. It won't spoil it. I could listen to it every day, and it would never fail to fascinate me.
The Sundays: Here's Where The Story Ends
There are no words.
Modern English: I Melt With You
Another lockdown video which is also a callback to my eighties mixtape. The song hit that sweet spot of one you'd remember but not too familiar, so that you'd get that Proustian remembrance effect.
Also, the original version makes one think "Christ! What a bunch of wankers!" I can't say that the update entirely rids one of that sensation, but as a general rule, getting old is a blessing.
Dicey Reilly: The Dubliners
Now, to be honest, I don't know why I included this. I was probably drunk. It's off the first Dubliners album I ever bought, which was kind of a reunion album (with an accompanying TV special I've still not seen), made in the banner year of 1988.
Siouxsie and The Banshees: Killing Jar, Burn Up
1988 was my last year in school. Beginning with pocket money record purchases, and accelerating when I got my first job the following year I mined that year for everything it had. And what riches it had! The children of punk came of age in that year. The Pogues and Billy Bragg released albums of staggering brilliance and beauty, and the Banshees gave us Peepshow.
I'm a sucker for a cello. Love this video for the eighties music show presenter awkwardness and the VHS artifacts.
Also, as far as I'm concerned, Siouxie still looks and dresses like this. I will not accept any evidence to the contrary.
Electric Light Orchestra: Can't Get It Out Of My Head
Okay. The cello thing can be taken too far.
I was really thrilled when George Harrison had his late eighties renaissance, and the Wilbury thing, with ELO's Jeff Lynne. So as a gormless schoolkid, I started shoplifting ELO records and cassettes (shoplifting pro tip: the cassettes are easier). I tried to like them, but my god, they were awful.
For decades afterward, I tried telling myself that actually, the first — budget-constrained — album was pretty good, what with the overdubbed raw scraping of bows on strings. A few Christmases ago I put that record on the turntable, and no, it's just bloody awful.
So this video is just self-flagellation, and a reminder of what punk fixed, however temporarily. Enjoy.
Madness presents - Two Mad Men and a String Quartet: Night Boat to Cairo
More lockdown. The only song I included in the mix was the first, as it later becomes apparent that Suggs is just phoning it in. Jesus. You had one job to do! Be a nutty boy. That's not an unreasonable request for a sixty year old man, surely? Look at Siouxie: she's still stunning!
The Smiths: Accept Yourself
Oh, Morrissey. Look at yourself. You poisoned it all.
Sleater-Kinney - You're No Rock N Roll Fun
Another one I got from some bonkers forum site. I knew guitarist Carrie Brownstein from Portlandia, one of those Lorne Michaels catchphrase-driven sketch comedy shows that are never quite as funny as you want them to be. I'd heard that she was in some band called Sleater-Kinney, but I never felt sufficiently motivated to investigate.
This song is good, inoffensive guitar pop. What's not to love?
I'm working my way through the back catalogue, The first couple of albums are a bit raw, but the ones after that are in the grey area between offensive and inoffensive, otherwise known as my comfort zone.
Son House: Death Letter Blues
I never heard of Son House, can't remember how I got to this video, by my god this is the real stuff.
Hat Fitz and Itchy: Miss Mabel
Back in about 2002 my wife and I were in Annandale on a very important mission to get a pot of some specific colour of paint, and after securing said item and dinner at McDonalds, we wandered across Parramatta Road to the Empire Hotel for a beer. This was the inner west's premier blues venue, and as we sat down, a young blond-haired, blue-eyed boy started setting up on stage and I, in a terribly racist way, thought "Hello, get ready for some Eric Clapton."
Turned out he was actually quite good, and we stayed to the end of his set. By then we were a bit tipsy, and game for the next act on the bill: Hat Fitz and Itchy.
Good golly, Miss Molly. Never knew that it was possible to make that much sound out of a single guitar. Literally pinned back to the wall by the force of it. Never mind the malevolent glare Fitzy gave the audience as he sent them into paroxysms of pleasure. He was playing the audience as much as playing the guitar.
He announced that he accepted tips in the form of Jameson, and by the time they were done, the front of the stage was covered in little glasses. He's settled down now, and his current musical/life partner told me on a recent visit to Coffs that he doesn't drink at all any more. Which is nice.
I'm a couple of albums behind at the moment, but he's the kind of artist where it doesn't feel right to buy a CD anywhere but out of his suitcase at a live gig.
Neil Finn - Don't Dream It's Over
Yes, I know. All I want from life now is a cure for baldness and a string section that will follow me about on a cart.
Trashcan Sinatras: Best Days on Earth
Not the most prolific band on earth, but thirty years on still the most adept at tugging on heartstrings. I've a personal vignette I can't help but associate with this song, but it's a matter for another occasion.
The Pogues: Greenland Whale Fisheries
Okay, the whole concert video is mesmerising. I just included the whale one because it's such an oddity of a song, and so weird that Shane included it on the Pogues' first album. He has a logic that defies logic.
Shane here is just magic. He's a very capable guitar player, and possibly rivals Lydon as the best punk vocalist. That original simple lineup, the selection of traditional songs, and of course the glorious original compositions are pure genius. He engineered it all, but a few years later it crushed him.
Obscurity is underrated.
That 1 Guy - Whale Race
Not long after we moved to Sawtell, my brother-in-law and his girlfriend came down from Queensland and lived with us for a while before heading off again to Goondiwindi (sounds exotic, but don't go there unless you have a thing for red dirt). They'd seen That 1 Guy in Queensland, and insisted we all had to go see him at the Planto in Coffs.
(There's a doctoral dissertation to be had on the syntactical rules around Australian colloquial abbreviations. The Plantation Hotel is the Planto, while the Toormina Hotel is the Toormi and the Sawtell Hotel is the Sawty. The Park Beach Hotel/Motel is the Hoey Moey. Nobody feels the need to ask why.)
I was so impressed that when I bought a CD from him after the gig I positively gushed. In those days he and the magic pipe mostly stuck to a pithy three minute pop format, and I said he reminded me of the raw, percussive thing that Tom Waits does (I don't think I was any more eloquent than that, sadly). He seemed genuinely flattered and said he knew some people who had worked with Waits, and would really love to do so. I was chuffed to learn a few years ago that he eventually did.
He's become a bit more symphonic in recent years. It should offend my punk sensibilities, but this holds one's attention for nearly ten minutes. Plus it's about whales.
The Undertones, True Confessions
You have to. You just do. Two minutes, in and out. Thrashing guitars, no whales, no violins, just pure mischieveous joy on BBC2.
