Any Other Business: Part LXX

As the title suggests, so forth.

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The Dolt Who Shouts Bravo

Before the pandemic ruined everything I taped a performance of Debussy’s La Mer from the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. And at the end, before the orchestra had had a chance to relax, before the music had had a chance to die away, and before the audience had had a chance to register its deep appreciation, some idiot bellowed BRA-VO! This really got my goat at the time. And it got Petroc Trelawny’s goat a few weeks ago when the dolt who shouts bravo appeared again at the Proms. I could have done without that BRA-VO!, muttered the good Trelawny, as, once again, the last notes of music were not given a chance to settle and fade away before this jack in a box was out of his seat shouting BRA-VO! I’ve been trying to parse what it is that so irks me about this fool, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is because his shout has nothing to do with the orchestra and everything to do with him. Sitting in a mass of people he cannot bear the thought of being lost in the thunder of group applause, he must assert his individuality by gazumping the audience, the music, and common decency by shouting before the time is right. He would no doubt dispute this, saying that he is so moved by the music that he simply must jump up and register his individual approval before everybody else in a packed Royal Albert Hall. I would dispute this disputation as bosh.

To be a party man is to be morally compromised

Fine Gael are currently spitting blood at why the Zappone saga just will not end. The answer is simple, but eludes them because it is so very simple. The saga will not end until someone has been punished for wrongdoing. But that would be to admit that there was wrongdoing, and that would be to admit that someone in Fine Gael has done wrong, which is not possible because then they would not be a member of Fine Gael but of another political party. And so on runs the logic of each party’s think-in at this time of year. To be a party man is to be morally compromised. I never engaged with being a football fan because I found exactly this kind of blind loyalty disgusting. A player from a rival team barely brushes one of your players, and there are cries of REF SEND HIM OFF! A player from your team breaks the leg of a rival player, and there are mutters of No, that was a fair tackle, shouldn’t be a red card, nothing deliberate in it, I didn’t see any foul. If you are not affiliated with either side you look at this carry-on and see utter brazen mind-blowing hypocrisy. And that is what drives ordinary people mad about politics: the endless defence of the indefensible. The unquestioning acceptance of orders from the party that black is white on Monday and black is black on Friday if that’s what the party thinks is now needed to gain or retain power. In its own way it’s not just a question of being morally compromised, it’s a return to a pre-Socratic way of thinking. I owe generosity and decency to my clique, to everyone else the devil take the hindmost. It is somewhat depressing to have arrived at this present moment in history and find the party political system has reversed the axial moment in history. Coveney is bleating about the perception of lobbying and the perception he lied, because she lobbied and he lied. Simon Harris is leaking like a sieve, as is Catherine Martin, but they are in the ha’penny place to Leo the Leak, who has now been caught out three times during the pandemic doing things that he or his flunkies have told everyone else not to do. One feels Harold Macmillan would have fired Coveney, Varadkar, Harris and C Martin by now, but Michael Martin apparently feels unable to do so because it would spark an election. Well, given that Varadkar scraped in on the 5th count in the last election that’s something of a suicide pact, so have at it. If someone isn’t fired for this,  this scandal won’t leave the newscycle.

Any Other Business: Part LXIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

It’s March, Bones, but not as we knew it, not as we knew it, not as we knew it then

Something approaching a red alert

Now is the winter of our discontent… Etc. Hours before the clock struck midnight and we entered Level 5, a return to a modified form of the panicked lockdown of March and April, news leaked that the number of coronavirus cases in schools were actually surging. But no matter, the important thing is that most people stay under house arrest for six weeks, while the schools stay open. If the numbers don’t improve, we will be chided for our complacency, rather than the schools being shuttered just to see if that might make a difference. The 5 Level plan fell apart from the moment it was announced Dublin was between two of the stages. The Engineer held forth last week to me that all we needed was a simple 3 Level plan — 1) basic precautions 2) things are hotting up 3) lock it down — and simple empirical thresholds to trigger those transitions, like 14-day new cases/per 100,000 population figures applied by county. Instead we have had our own ‘chaotic disaster’ of illogic, inconsistency, endless leaking by Leo Varadkar and Simon Harris, and pointless back and forth. And what frustrates more than all is the insistence that the schools stay open, even though this logically consistently offends against reason when all gatherings are bad, all indoor gatherings are very bad, but schools are somehow magically grand.

I for one have this vision of —-Level 6: Apocalypse—

BUT THE SCHOOLS STAY OPEN

Trop de Grand Tours

Yesterday while watching Eurosport manfully attempt to cover the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta Espana at the same time my mind rebelled. I had slowly realised that the Giro seemed light on big names this year after Geraint Thomas was invalided out, and then when watching highlights showing Roglic pipping Alaphillipe for Liege-Bastogne-Liege I figured out that if they were there then many big names had skipped the Giro because it overlapped with the Vuelta. The Vuelta was therefore the bigger race. But watching them both in these past few days has been an unnerving experience. I have literally started to feel cold just from watching the unusual vistas: there is something karmically wrong about Grand Tour cycling in the late autumn, indeed the Vuelta is going to hurtle into November. And even when temperatures were still high in Sicily the landscapes looked autumnal, and increasingly desolate. Not exactly the mood you usually get from the sun-kissed tours. And not exactly the mood you want to imprint on yourself for six weeks of strictest lockdown either…

Any Other Business: Part LX

As the title suggests, so forth.

But if it’s a five stage plan, how can we have started at level 2.5 and gone on to level 3, with elements of level 4? That just doesn’t track.

“I have a new plan, it involves beards and Morocco”

–So we beat on, boats all moored on the quay, hopelessly tied up for the present.

The media has curiously decided to remember the unelected and indeed rejected regime of Leo & Simon as the golden age of communications; despite the fiasco of the picnic in the park, coming after the statesman speech that said nothing, and the literal game of name that quote played for a celebrity Twitter audience.

But Dublin finds itself in an intolerable situation. The simplest task seems to stump this new cobbled together coalition of the unwanted. Why announce a plan with five levels, and simultaneously announce that Dublin is betwixt and between levels two and three? Why announce that Dublin is moving to level three, but then crucify pubs and restaurants with level four restrictions without calling those restrictions by name? Why pretend that any of this is based on science when there is no actual evidence that pubs and restaurants have been spreading disease while we all look pointedly at schools, that opened suspiciously at the right time to be responsible for the recent spike, and which will remain open – even during level five – because … science said that’s that okay?

The sinister nature of classical music

Hannibal is leaving Netflix at the end of September. Good riddance, one should say. But a completist Mads Mikkelsen impulse drove me to try and crash thru the final two seasons. To no avail. 6 episodes into season 2 and its increasingly disgusting visuals I began to lose the will to live and had to abandon the drive to the Reichenbach fall. There is much to dislike about the clear enjoyment the makers take in showing human organs being turned into haute cuisine, even when it’s a major character; suggesting they were talking about themselves when having Will say Hannibal eats not to honour, but because he regards humans as no different to pigs. So to Bryan Fuller et al these are not real living breathing characters, just empty sharply dressed ciphers to be pushed (agonisingly slowly) around the chessboard; in a world conveniently entirely devoid of CCTV outside the lunatic asylum. But I also began to be disheartened by the relentless yoking of classical music to Hannibal’s ghoulish evil. It reminded me of a piece around 2015 that praised Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation for giving Simon Pegg’s comic relief Benjy a love of classical music, when the standard operating procedure would have been to give such a detail to Sean Harris’ supervillain Solomon Lane as a marker of his supervillainy, a la Stromberg in The Spy Who Loved Me; watching sharks eat people to the strains of Mozart. Cruise and McQuarrie went further in fact, basing an astonishing set-piece around Puccini’s Turandot, and making ‘Nessun Dorma’ the leitmotif for Rebecca Ferguson’s mysterious assassin. But why is this so damn unusual? Why is classical music so often relegated to nonsense touches like Kevin Bacon’s Beethoven-loving Nazi in the cold open of X-Men: First Class? Football fans lap up ‘Nessun Dorma’ and ‘Zadok the Priest’, everybody who whistles the ‘Imperial March’ from Star Wars is unconsciously a fan of ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’ from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Why do film-makers who will often edit to a temp-track of classical music so despise that very same classical music when it comes to depicting it as a part of their characters’ lives?

Any Other Business: Part LVI

As the title suggests, so forth.

“The new orders say we’re all to wear masks now. My world is collapsing…”

Status Crimson Tide

Well, today is the first day of Status Crimson Tide. And basically everything is good to go: pubs are open with provisos, churches are open with crowd control, cinemas are open with clearances, barbers are open with bookings, galleries are open with guidance, and countrywide drives can be conducted with caution. There was meant to be Status Captain Scarlet on July 20^th, and then the all clear on August 10^th, but things got …accelerated. It was obvious that public compliance with social distance, especially among young people, wasn’t just fraying but had completely broken down, so the government was just making official what had become obvious. I’m inclined to think that the blame can be laid largely on the government itself. Leo’s little picnic was the kibosh on people inconveniencing themselves for the sake of others when the unelected and in fact rejected Taoiseach would have no such sacrifices for himself. The complete failure of voluntary mask-wearing is a corollary of this decline of moral authority. Leo and Simon Harris did photo-ops of themselves wearing masks and nobody cared. After all they had been disparaging masks for nearly four months. Were they lying then or lying now? So now we have a new law to force mask-wearing on buses, and HSE ads have begun to run on TV extolling the joys of mask-wearing: it’s to protect others from you spreading the disease. NO DUH! That was obvious in March. But from March onwards all the government wanted to talk about was how masks would encourage bad behaviour and the science was uncertain. The science wasn’t uncertain, the bad behaviour argument was idiotic, and the upshot is that masks are unlikely to take off here which will hurt us all in the long run in trying to get back to a functioning society.

Christophe Beck and the Buffy sound

Crashing thru Buffy on E4’s late-night re-runs, almost from the first few minutes of episode of season 2 it was obvious that something had changed, and that change was confirmed when the credits rolled: Christophe Beck had entered the recording studio.  If season 1 was scored in a surprisingly straightforward spooky music for horror set-ups way then season 2 was when Beck, and almost by implication the other composers working around him, realised that this series was not an out and out horror show and should be scored as such. Instead it should be set with an emphasis on melancholy and romance as well as stirring action and jump scares.

Jools and the Jazz Trance

Well, now. So Jools Holland was allowed to present Later…with Jools Holland solo again as I had wished for before Christmas, and it only took a global pandemic to stop the middle-management meddling… It was nice, if curious, to have a featured guest interviewed and curate archive performances interspersed with the odd musical guest in the curious Zoom fashion of the times. And damn if Jools didn’t regale Gregory Porter, to Porter’s obvious delight, with the tale of the jazz trance mentioned hereabouts last year. It was a 2010 live episode of Later…with Jools Holland and Jools was trying in his inimitably (and endearing) ramshackle way to keep the show on track for time given that Newsnight was prepping to air live too once his show stopped. And standing waiting in the shadows was a large choir ready to join Elbow, but unfortunately he’d put on the McCoy Tyner Trio just before, and all four of them had gone into a proper eyes closed working out their harmonies by feel jazz trance. The camera captured a nervous looking Jools, baffled at how to get them to stop as he couldn’t make eye contact with any of the players: a moment of panic that reduced Dad and I to helpless laughter. At last one musician opened his eyes and Jools was able to flag him down. He stopped, and Jools initiated a round of applause. Only for McCoy Tyner to misinterpret this, in his jazz trance, as a groovy audience’s enthusiasm, and so into another chorus, only for Jools to foil him by asserting his authority as MC to insist that this had now gone on long enough and it was time for Elbow to get a look in.

St Vincent: one more tune

I didn’t want to put a cover version into the selection of 10 of her best songs the other day, but you should check out St Vincent’s performance of ‘Lithium’ with the surviving members of Nirvana, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, at their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 because what a cover version it is.

Any Other Business: Part LIV

As the title suggests, so forth.

Emily Maitlis punished for telling the truth, Domic Cummings given free pass for breaking lockdown

Dominic Cummings broke the rules, the country can see that, and it’s shocked the government cannot.

The longer ministers and prime minister tell us he worked within them, the more angry the response to this scandal is likely to be.

He was the man, remember, who always got the public mood, he tagged the lazy label of ‘elite’ on those who disagreed.

He should understand that public mood now. One of fury, contempt, and anguish.

He made those who struggled to keep to the rules feel like fools, and has allowed many more to assume they can now flout them.

The prime minister knows all this, but despite the resignation of one minister, growing unease from his backbenchers, a dramatic early warning from the polls, and a deep national disquiet, Boris Johnson has chosen to ignore it.

Tonight, we consider what this blind loyalty tells us about the workings of Number 10.

We do not expect to be joined by a government minister, but that won’t stop us asking the question.

Peter Mandelson was an essential part of New Labour; in the triumvirate of himself, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown.

Tony Blair fired Peter Mandelson, twice.

How pathetic a man of straw must Boris ‘Bullsh-t and Bluster’ Johnson be to fear firing Dominic Cummings even once?

SEAL Team: Mandy & Jason!

Hey now! That was unexpected. Almost exactly two months ago I was noting that Jessica Pare’s burnt CIA analyst Mandy had been notably underused in season 3, so it was nice to see her unexpectedly get tactical alongside Blackburn and Davis as Havoc fell, and impose herself on the action in her guilt-ridden determination to rescue her kidnapped asset. I said then that her ‘work the problem drive’ and firefight skills gave new hope to shippers that Mandy and Jason would get together, despite the awesome kismet that exists in Emily Swallow as Jason’s partner Natalie; uniting as it does Supernatural‘s Amara with Buffy’s Angel. And now, thanks to the coronavirus tanking the last two episodes of the season, season 3 has ended with the very unexpected knock on the door of Jason to Mandy. In a visceral twist on Bones and Booth’s imperviousness versus strength equation they are now finally suited as romantic partners because they are both as damaged as the other.

Will the NCH survive this?

I completed a survey the other day from the National Concert Hall looking for feedback on the various options they are exploring for re-opening under COVID-19 conditions in the coming months. It provided considerable food for thought. Should there be no intervals to avoid people stampeding to the toilets and queuing too closely for refreshments? How much of the hall should be left empty? What about temperature checks and the end of physical tickets? How disconcerting would all this be? How likely would it be that you would simply wait for a coronavirus vaccine before venturing out to hear live music again? After reading thru all these puzzlers I began to wonder if the NCH will actually survive this. After all its audience does skew older so would be more likely to eschew mass gatherings prior to a vaccine. And if many seats have to be left empty will the prices perforce rise for the remaining seats creating a doom loop where demand falls because of high prices causing even higher prices to try and stabilise revenue? And how does one even programme in the absence of an interval? The logic of a concert like Arvo Part’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten followed by Grieg’s Piano Concerto followed by an interval followed by Brahms’ 2^nd Symphony falls apart if there is no interval. Can large symphonies even be performed under social distancing? Or will there need to be many re-orchestrations of gargantuan orchestral works for chamber orchestras? There were a number of concerts I had planned to attend that have fallen victim to the government lockdown – Maxim Vengerov playing and conducting, Barry Douglas leading the Beethoven Triple Concerto, the RTE NSO tackling among other works Sibelius’ 5th Symphony, Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, Debussy’s La Mer, Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto, and Rachmaninov’s 3rd Piano Concerto. I don’t know if programmes like this will exist in the near future, and I don’t know if I will be willing to put myself at risk to hear the music performed live.

2020: The Year the Final Curtain Fell

There has been much talk in a spuriously optimistic life gives you lemons make lemonades vein about how Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest works during the plague. There has been less talk of how Shakespeare’s company took commercial and artistic advantage of the decimation of their rivals by the plague. And the stop-start nature of the Elizabethan theatre looks to be the most salient point of all. This may be the end of theatre as we know it for quite some time. A general shuttering of the theatres akin to Cromwell might last for some years with intermittent ineffectual re-openings in between resurgent waves of the coronavirus. Theatre as an art form might come back eventually, after a vaccine is found, but it is unlikely that all the individual theatres currently around will be there to return at that point. There will be something between a winnowing and a purge. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Gate Theatre need to be founded anew in 2028 for its second attempt at reaching 100.

“By gad, sir, that’s leadership”

Leo Varadkar went for a picnic in the park with friends, days after his Assistant Secretary General Liz Canavan publicly told people not to go for a picnic in the park with friends. “If you’re visiting a public amenity try not to stay too long at the site or have picnics. Please do your exercise and then go home.” People accurately heard “try not to … have picnics”. Leo tried to, with some level of organisation, and succeeded. How did Canavan respond? Claiming she had not seen images of Leo having a picnic in the park with friends. Indeed… Well, hold the briefing for a second, and the assembled press corps can pull up the pictures and hold their phones up and then, having seen them, she can comment on them; unless she averted her eyes to maintain an increasingly implausible plausible deniability.  The damage control centred on insisting that Leo had moved residence since lockdown, despite telling off people for going to their second homes, and therefore he was allowed to go for a picnic in the park with friends because it was within 5km of his residence. Nobody cares that Leo was within 5km. Some people might care that he’s escorted by Gardai when he moves residence when everyone else was being stopped by Gardai for attempting to do so. Everybody cares that Leo’s staff told everyone else not go for a picnic in the park with friends, while Leo himself was clearly planning to do just that himself. Perhaps he wanted to ensure an empty park for ease of social distancing? Canavan’s defence was, “Again this is guidance. We’re asking people to use their head.” We are using our heads. If it’s guidance that doesn’t apply to Leo, then it shouldn’t apply to anyone else either, so why bother mentioning it at all? Defending the indefensible is the one thing politicians do that infuriates more than any other infraction. There was no apology, no contrition. Not unlike Dominic Cummings, who flagrantly breached the rules he was instrumental in drawing up and promoting, and can’t stop lying about it. No apology, no contrition, just increasingly outlandish excuses and explanations. To drive from one end of England to the other for childcare is the act of a caring father? Meanwhile people walking their dogs in a deserted area are shamed by police drones, people attempting to enter supermarkets as couples to speed up their shopping are shamed by officious stewards, and people attempting to sit in parks are hysterically abused at close quarters by braying police officers. Elsewhere England’s father of the year is busy bundling his wife and kid into a car for a 30 mile drive, to check if he can see beyond the bottom of the driveway. One would have thought it might make more sense, paternally speaking, to make that suicide run a solo mission. But then of course by an astonishing coincidence it was his wife’s birthday when the Specsavers Special steamed into a noted beauty spot. Meanwhile in America Senators Loeffler, Burr and Perdue are also stoutly maintaining the coincidental defence: they did not run from a classified briefing on the coronavirus to find a quiet corner in the Capitol to shout “SELL FOCKING EVERYTHING!” down the phone at their stockbrokers, before brainstorming which stocks would likely rise in a global pandemic, and ringing back their stockbrokers with instructions on what to buy. When the elite decide not to follow the rules, they should not be surprised if the plebeian masses suddenly out of nowhere get the idea not to follow the rules either. Pericles died in the plague that devastated Athens in the early years of the Peloponnesian War. Pericles will be remembered forever. One wonders if the current crop of leaders will be remembered that far into the future? Or will they have created a world that thinks of Pericles only that he should have sailed to Sardis to test his eyesight…

Any Other Business: Part LI

As the title suggests, so forth.

“It’s mandatory advisory, but it’s not compulsory”

And we’re back to this unloved Fine Gael gibberish again. Leo Varadkar, who’d like to remind you a few more times that he’s a medical doctor, thinks the science is uncertain when it comes to masks. It is not. The Atlantic tried to disentangle the miasma of confusion and scepticism around wearing a face mask. For some baffling reason it’s being led by the WHO, one hopes not simply for political reasons to avoid agreeing with Taiwan. There are two distinct concepts here that are endlessly conflated – ingress and egress. To prevent oneself getting infected you need medical-grade PPE, but to stop oneself infecting everyone else you simply need a cotton bandanna. A cotton mask will reduce virus particles emitted from your mouth by 99%, quite obviously reducing your chances of infecting anyone. “Models show that if 80% of people wear masks that are 60% effective, easily achievable with cloth, we can get to an effective R₀ of less than one. That’s enough to halt the spread of the disease”. Sure, there are other factors at play, like social distancing and demographics, but “in every region that has adopted widespread mask-wearing, case and death rates have been reduced within a few weeks”. So the science here is uncertain in the same sense that George Bush Jr used to insist the science was uncertain on global warming. But whatever, just advise people to wear masks, and then watch so many Mike Pences float about the place boasting “I’m not infected”, oblivious to the fact that you can be infected after taking a test clearing you, the virus takes days to manifest, and you can be asymptomatic.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time

We are now well into the fifth week of Status Burgundy lockdown. It is clear that the ‘caretaker’ government is softening us up by leak after leak for an extension for another 2 weeks, and adding insult to injury by blaming it on our complacency over social distancing rather than their strategic blindness over nursing homes being an obvious locus for COVID-19. But given the hysteria over policing this Bank Holiday does anyone seriously think that we will not be in lockdown for the June Bank Holiday too? Come Friday, Varadkar and Harris will trot out and regretfully inform us that because we got complacent, and our lax social distancing (inexplicably) caused a spike in transmission in nursing homes, that we will have to do penance for another two weeks. When those two weeks are nearly up, they will appear again, and announce another two week extension to take the June Bank Holiday out of play, lest all our good work be undone by dispersal to the seaside, and make this seem like a moment of buoyant optimism – this is how we beat COVID-19, can’t you see it? can’t you see it? One might think simply making it mandatory that everybody wear a mask at all times might allow us out of this national house arrest of not being allowed stray further than 2km on foot. One might equally think that a government clearly rejected by the people should not be making such consequential decisions for those people, all the while calling for national unity while openly disdaining 1/4 of voters. One would apparently be wrong on both fronts.

Any Other Business: Part L

As the title suggests, so forth.

Modern Family goes big

11 years is a long time for a sitcom to run, Cheers and MASH did it, but they didn’t have child actors built into the premise of the show like Modern Family did. Modern Family is the only American network sitcom that I would stand beside Arrested Development, and for much the same reasons. The faux docu-format, the lack of a soundtrack, and the delight in absurdity made it stand out in a world befouled by Chuck Lorre crudities. What made Modern Family so great for so long was the sheer variety of comedy in play: cross purposes, mistaken identity, sight gags, slapstick, word play, parody. Its weakest moments came in seasons that wobbled towards parody in the way that the final Naked Gun movie seemed to run out of comic invention and leaned too heavily into parody and ex nihilo zaniness. The triumph of the show is that it managed to course correct, perhaps as the maturing of the child actors into adults opened up new realms for the writers to explore. As a result this final season, now airing on Sky One, has had episodes; in particular ‘The Prescott’; that have been dizzying in the sheer number of plates kept spinning for twenty minutes, while the ‘Paris’ special feels like a North by Northwest moment as the writers grabbed one last big chance to do stuff they’d always wanted to but never got to.

Supernatural returns

E4 have finally got round to airing season 14 of Supernatural, two years after season 13. Since then RTE2 have shown the second revival of The X-Files, which seemed at times to be directly pitting itself against its spiritual descendant. Supernatural is not the show it was back in 2005, not least because someone turned on the lights in season 6 after creator Eric Kripke left and they’ve never been turned off again since, which has changed the goriness and mood of the show. But starting season 14 now is an odd moment, because you can’t but be aware that season 15 is coming to an end in America, and its final episode will be the finale for the entire series. Supernatural began in 2005, first aired in Ireland on TV3 in summer 2006, and will likely finish its run on E4 in 2021 or 2022 depending on their dilatoriness. That is an incredible amount of time to have spent with the characters of Dean and Sam Winchester, and their treasured Chevy Impala – which as we know from Chuck turned out to be the most important object in the history of the universe.

The democratic revolution continues

Today is the first day of a further three week period of what feels rather like martial law, imposed by a government rejected by the people but which has refused to leave office – and nobody in the media seems to want make a fuss about that. Far from all being in this together the Garda Commissioner has been actively encouraging people to inform on their neighbours. That feels a bit too much like Soviet Russia for my liking, and, it should be noted, comes just months after Drew Harris wanted access to everyone’s business on their phone ‘to fight serious crime’. That was before the pandemic. As the idea of testing and tracing for a relaxation of lockdown in Germany involves accessing data on phones it’s not hard to see Drew’s snooping being double downed as ‘for the sake of public health’. And yet… a temporary crisis is always a perfect moment for doing away with civil liberties on a permanent basis. By all means lockdown the country for public health, but let’s have more discussion. And if a national crisis needs national unity then form a national government. The refusal to do so should be seen for what it is, and discussed for what it is, a shameful attempt by Fine Gael to profit politically from a pandemic. Their failed election campaign centred on scaremongering that only they could handle the crisis of Brexit. And now they cling stubbornly to power to … make their point that only they can handle a crisis…? Remember Varadkar blustering he wanted to go into opposition? What exactly does it take for Fine Gael to leave government when they lose an election? Must we send the entire Cabinet abroad for St Patrick’s Day and change all the ministerial locks?

Any Other Business: Part XLVIII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Status … Burgundy

Drip, drip, drip… It seems best to describe where we are now as Status Burgundy. We can still leave our homes without a printed and signed permission slip so it’s not quite Status Red. Yet. But as with the drip, drip, drip feed of restrictions tightening like a vise there’s a lot of ‘yet’ in the air too. Why did we not move to this crisis status immediately on March 13th? Why the sustained refusal to admit that schools would not re-open on the 30th? Fears of ‘behavioural fatigue’? It’s not like we don’t know from the experience of countries preceding us in these dominoes how this works; if you are responding to the numbers as they spike you are already too late. Uncertainty is not something stock markets or citizens appreciate. Varadkar unbelievably decided to paraphrase Terminator 2 last night following his Churchill plagiarism last week, refused to call this a lockdown when being told to ‘stay at home’ (even emblazoned under the RTE logo today onscreen) is patently a lockdown, and unwittingly combined the worst elements of Trump and Modi’s addresses. We were given three hours notice not to stray more than 2km from the house or else. But Leo, outside of Dublin it might be more than 2km to the nearest food store. And so today, presumably after howls from outside the Pale, we have a ‘clarification’ that 2km is the straying radius for exercise, you can stray 5km to get yourself a burger.

SEAL Team: Havoc has Fallen

Jessica Pare’s burnt CIA analyst Mandy has been notably underused in season 3 so it was nice to see her unexpectedly get tactical alongside Blackburn and Davis as Havoc fell the other night on Sky One and impose herself on the action in her guilt-ridden determination to rescue her kidnapped asset. Her work the problem drive and firefight skills also gave new hope to shippers that Mandy and Jason should get together, despite the awesome kismet that exists in Emily Swallow as Jason’s partner Natalie; uniting as it does Supernatural‘s Amara with Buffy’s Angel. The use of drone photography on SEAL Team has been outstanding but season 3, especially the opening episodes in Serbia, has taken it to new heights. The fact that this story of Bravo getting roughed up in Venezuela has now revealed itself as a three-parter makes one compare this trio of episodes very favourably to most action films out there. I for one would take the thrilling and legible choreography of the action in these three episodes against the choppy nonsense of Mile 22 any day.

Any Other Business: Part XLVII

As the title suggests, so forth.

What You Waiting For?

Why aren’t we already on lockdown? What are we waiting for? Surely it is time to stop pretending social distancing is going to get the job done. A lockdown is inevitable, just tell us when it’s going to be! Did we need permission from the example of the British doing it, because they allegedly have top experts working on the notion of behavioural fatigue? Today we had the nonsense that Government policy is not responsive to what’s Trending on Twitter, after Ministers have spent a fortnight calling out people based on videos that have been posted on Twitter. The Government will make a decision tomorrow, probably, based on the advice of the medical experts. As with so much else in the last 9 years Fine Gael hides behind someone else when they want to do something they want to do but want to pretend it’s being foisted on them. It is beyond time for Status Red. This is as ludicrous as the airlines having to decide in the absence of the State making any judgement call that it was probably a bad idea to be flying in and out to Italy 4 times a day. For once stop hiding behind other people, make the call yourself Varadkar, and do it already.

Time Tunnel Revisited

Well now, this has been rewarding. After 4 episodes of The Time Tunnel I am happy that, unlike when Beauregarde Hinkelmeister-Schmitt ruined my childhood by showing me The Equaliser, Irwin Allen’s sci-fi show has been entertaining damn near 30 years after watching it. A particular joy being the writers clearly revelling in the time-travel paradoxes of an episode where a character in the present watches on in horror at his ruthless behaviour in the future. And, in a demented touch involving a comet not quite hitting the earth because of the tunnel’s interference, the writers both aim to be a bit trippy and insist that their time travelling is a closed loop – everything has already happened the way it happened because of their interference before they even start interfering.

Any Other Business: Part XLVI

As the title suggests, so forth.

Just in the nick of time!

I almost didn’t notice it but the Horror Channel are re-running The Time Tunnel from the very beginning in their Sci-Fi Zone. I for one shall be tuning in at 12pm tomorrow for a triple bill. Irwin Allen’s 1960s shows were re-run in the late 1980s and early 1990s on Channel 4 and Sky One and I have very fond memories of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, and The Time Tunnel. Having been highly impressed in the last few years by re-runs of The Avengers, The Man From UNCLE, and The Invaders I’ll be interested to see how this stands up. In particular when I was originally watching the show I was totally unaware that Lee Meriwether, who played scientist Dr Ann MacGregor, was Catwoman in the 1966 Batman movie. And if you think a triple-bill on a Saturday afternoon is overdoing it then I merely say you can’t excuse yourself on the basis that you possibly have anything else to do at this particular moment in time.

Who fears to take The Strokes Test?

Back in January Stephen Errity sent me on Evan Rytlewski’s provocative tweet (https://twitter.com/Evanryt/status/1215008355149856768) about what he called The Strokes Test: Would people still care about this band if their best album did not exist?  It is meant to knock out The Strokes but it also gravely endangers Nirvana, because of their tragically truncated discography. Pixies survive the test because if you get into an argument over whether Surfer Rosa or Doolittle should go then you are still left with either Surfer Rosa or Dootlittle to place beside Bossa Nova and Trompe le Monde. Talking Heads survive the test in style because if you get into a spat over Fear of Music, Remain in Light, Speaking in Tongues, or Little Creatures as their best album you are still left with three great albums and several more to boot. A similar embarrassment of riches occurs for the Beatles, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, U2 and REM. But, and here’s a nagging thought, what about the Beach Boys? Absent Pet Sounds from their discography and what remains? And once you dwell on that you realise you could say the same for Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Kinks and the Who. Any band with a number of great songs that never truly perfected the art of making essential albums is imperilled by the test.

And normal service has been resumed…

We are a week into the social distancing shuttering of the country and yet the government won’t admit what we all know – a more perfect lockdown is coming. The universities have abandoned the 2019/20 academic year; it’s over, classes, exams, something something online, don’t bother coming back to campus, have a good summer, see you in the autumn, maybe. The schools patently will be told to stay out until the Easter holidays begin, and then, sure why not take off all of April, and well, you know, May is kind of freewheeling into the end of the year anyway so who really needs it. Yet officially everything is still just on the mother of all pauses until March 29th. Are we supposed to take that seriously? Are we meant to believe all pubs and cinemas, cafes and theatres will re-open on that day and we all breathe a sigh of relief that we shut down that pesky coronavirus good? How does it help to keep the citizens of the country engaged in an idiotic guessing game? When will the actual status red lockdown begin? March 30th? April 1st? What is the point of Leo Varadkar embarrassing himself and us by going on national television on St Patrick’s Day to plagiarise Winston Churchill? You do not become a statesman for our time by appropriating a resonant phrase from a statesman from another state at another time anymore than I would become Dan Rather by ending all these posts with the single word – Courage. Yet Varadkar decided to tell us what we already knew about the coronavirus, fail to elaborate on economic aids for people thrown out of work, and did not announce a lockdown – which one would have thought the only reason for such a state of the nation address. Instead he told us the Emergency was ‘likely’ to continue past March 29th. Good to know.

Courage!