Author: shaned

Categories
music

I’ve been mostly listening to

Fionn Regan’s “The End of History”. This singer-songwriter from Wicklow constantly reminds me of Nick Drake. I’d like to think history will bestow him a similar status but none of the tragedy. I remember reading an article by Bob Dylan a few years ago where he described accomplished singer songwriters who don’t get the recognition their talent deserves as “secret heroes”
The album is lyrically sophisticated, elegiac and uplifting in equal measure. Humorous, poignant and musically nuanced. It’s also “catchy” 🙂 Perfect thing for a lazy Saturday straining under the weight of all those damn adjectives!

Categories
politics

Gardai – deux points

The title refers to R receiving a speeding ticket from a Garda yesterday. It occured on the recently finished (then refinishined, then refinished…) outer ring road in Waterford. I was with her at the time and I was bloody annoyed at the attitude of the Gardai. The speed limit on the Road is 60km/h. So anyone not from Waterford is thinking it must be in an urban area. Well, actually, it’s not. It’s one of the best road surfaces in Waterford which mostly travels through semi-rural areas with the ocassional shopping centre, business park or housing estate. It also happens to be a dual carriageway with roundabouts every few kilometers, enabling a relatively fast journey around Waterford.
So why give it a speed limit of 60 km/h which after all is after all under 40 miles an hour? This is not much faster than built-up and genuinely dangerous urban areas.
The official reason from the local authority and the NRA seems to be the assertion that it’s used by cyclists and pedestrians. Well there are 80 km/h and 100km/h regional and national roads with cyclists. Many of these have worse surfaces and are not dual carriageways. Equally, the road in question has wide walkways and cycle lanes for much of it. You only have to drive around for a few hours to realise that the driving norm is exceeding this bizarre speed limit.
The RSA like to tell us that SPEED KILLS. I’ve writ it in bold capitals so it’s easier to understand. The standard RSA message involves bludgeoning you into submission rather than careful consideration of facts, causes, effects or anything so educated. When driving from Waterford to Cork/Dublin/Limerick it’s relatively easy to spot what really kills. Unfortunately, the RSA haven’t found a snappy message but here goes
.

  • Idiots who engage in blind overtaking, due to corners or hills. If you do this you are an idiot. There’s no way around it. You’re an accident waiting to happen.
  • Professional Lorry and HGV drivers who speed. There are many of these and when they’re involved in an accident the potential for multiple deaths is high.
  • Kids with modified cars who think they’re on a race track
  • Those who drive while intoxicated
  • Those who speed in wet or slippery conditions
  • Motorcyclists who are apparently exempt from speed regulations

R was caught doing a MASSIVE 84 km/h. Let’s convert that into a real speed.. so that’s just over 52 mph on a FRIGGIN DUAL CARRIAGEWAY. There were 2 members of the traffic corps. blocking the road with their cute little guns, like a schoolyard game of cowboys and indians. Despite the fact that we were overtaken by 2 other cars our large black SUV was pulled over, for some reason. We shared this distinction with a BMW 3 series coupe. R was given her 2 points and asked to “slow down!”
Yep, we got the message alright. She’s going to drive much slower in future as you never know when some chancer is going to hop out in front of you with a gun and give you a fine for driving 52 mph on a dual carriageway. The message is clear that others in less expensive automobiles will be waved on. Is this a stealth method to reduce the budget deficit?
Yet, it seems like there’s a serious road accident involving multiple deaths every week, mainly caused by the bad habits outlined above.
Like gardai hanging around driving test centres, the doling out of financial penalties for minor offenses to law abiding citizens only emphasises the public perception of a group who’d prefer to shoot fish in a barrel than effectively tackle the incidents of serious crime and violence we see on our streets. This perception may be inaccurate but it lingers (as illustrated by this article in a local paper).
The root of lawlessness is in seemingly arbitrary laws applied in an arbitrary manner.
Or as Calvin Coolidge so eloquently explained to the Massachusetts State Senate…

“Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of law.”

I’ve heard senior gardai questioned about a penchant for picking on easy traffic offenses on good stretches of road on several radio shows, including the popular Ray Darcy show and also on Newstalk. They always deny the claim, yet the question persists suggesting that the public simply don’t believe them.
For the past few weeks, local newspapers have contained reports of extreme violence involving guns, knives, petrol bombs and other instruments of terror as part of a feud in a particular section of our community. A mostly unarmed police force appears ill-equipped to deal with such reckless attitudes to human life. I sympathise with the gardai in such situations as they’re endangered while trying to uphold peace and justice. They’re largely a mechanism here of an executive which has failed to protect them through legislative reform. A recent survey revealed that more than half of the serving gardai want to carry firearms for personal protection.
However, the view that an unarmed police force will aim for the softest of targets in one that is widely held.

Categories
films

Batman v Mulder

The alternative title for this blog post is “Why Cosmo Landesman’s reviews in the Sunday Times are a complete waste of time.”. This is not the first time this has occured to me. He writes well but his views are often uninformative. There have been many instances when Mr. Landesman made a dramatic attempt to show his artfulness and artiness with a willfully bad review of a good if populist movie. However, his review of the latest Batman movie is excrement. R & I saw it last week and we both thought it was marvellous for the most part. Indeed, R never liked comic book adaptations but was surprised at how good a movie it was, transcending its pulp genre with stunning camerawork, great acting, some neat plot twists and good dialogue. Let’s not forget that the movie has to overcome the premise that a grown man wants to dress up as a bat, yet it does so convincingly. Heath Ledger’s joker is almost as good as advertised and contrasted nicely with Day Lewis’ Daniel Plainview in “There will be blood” which we also saw last weekend.
Indeed, The Dark Knight may be as good a movie as Paul Anderson’s oscar winner. This is due in part to the former exceeding and transcending expectations while the latter being overhyped.
Mr. Landesman would have you believe that the Dark Knight is spoiled by politically correct yet implausible vexing on the part of the hero about whether he is blameworthy for the deaths of innocents at the hands of his nemesis. This ignores a large and plausible part of the plot whereby the joker calls on our bat obsessed hero to publicly unmask himself. The review appeared dismissive, glib and ultimately unworthy of the spectacle provided by the Nolan brothers.
On the other hand his review of the X Files gives it the same 2 star rating. To say that these movies were on a par is about as sensible as suggesting the moon is made of a refined extra -mature cheddar. It’s clearly edam. The X Files is a woefully mediocre movie. It’s not terrible but its flaws are so large they stick in your craw, upsetting digestion for hours after the movie is finished. On first inspection you’d think Billy Connolly would be a terrible choice as a paedophile priest “blessed” with some kind of sixth sense. Actually he’s rather good in this slightly hammy role. Nor is the problem “a lack of ideas” as attributed by Cosmo Landesman. The basic premise which drives the plot is actually fine. The problem is that the movie has no idea what its about.
There’s a smattering of love story but it feels phoney. Why, after the series ended, do two lovers who’ve been living together for over a year still refer to themselves by their surnames? This conceit of the earlier episodes of the show is gone by the feature length denoument. Why is there so much time spent on the sick kid? He’s a shallow plot device. It doesn’t work. Why do we learn so little about the techniques and motivations of the limb transplanting bad guys. They’re definitely cartoon baddies as we’re afforded nothing in the way of character development and there’s little clue as to why they’re practicing their abominations. (always liked that word :-)) There are interminable scenes of implausible emotional angst between the two leads, where Scully decides she might have to leave Mulder because of all this “darkness”. This comes across as more high-grade crapola. Appaling and silly character development for the leads. Having watched the TV serious which was so brilliantly scripted and directed by Carter, Wong and Morgan, I can’t believe 10-13 productions couldn’t do so much better.
“I want to believe” feels like it was directed and most particularly editted by a committee, without a single autocratic vision to guide them. Even the wrong vision would have been better than the mish-mash that unfolds.
However, this isn’t an awful movie. The acting is good, most of the dialogue is fine and there are some witty moments. Also, the series has been on tv recently so anyone dismising this as the review of someone who has halcyon romanticised recollections of the series is mistaken. Many episodes of the series really were that good. Genre-defining and defying in the way that only the Nolan brothers and Guilermo del Toro have achieved in recent memory.
With a clearer focus this could have been a very good movie. All the ingredients for a first rate omelete are there 🙂 As it is we’ve been left with a disappointment which is leading to some even more caustic reviews at rotten tomatoes.

Categories
art

Changes at manifesto.ie

Finally getting around to doing some more SEO work on manifesto.ie. The domain cloak wasn’t cutting it for SEO purposes and we also wanted a dotCom. So we’ve settled on www.manifestogallery.com. We’ll be using both in future publicity material and our main email addresses are still @manifesto.ie.