Blue Squares Make Twenty Million You Know

After getting a chance to watch some proper television last night (thank you BBC4 and your constant stream of nerdy documentaries) which was mainly concerned with the bubble within the modern art market (I'm sure there is a Paul Simon pun in there somewhere), I have meandered to being a part-time art critic (I don't get 90% of modern art hence I criticise it, and how can you be an artist and have six offices????) and Malthusian disciple (we are all fucked). One hour of television has caused moral abhorrence within me for people trying to make money out of creating false demand within an art form (should I be angry at EMI for Leona Lewis???), and then people going to a gallery because someone oligarch paid thirty million for some dubious art just because they want a look see out of curiosity. To top it all off Hirst had a GOLDEN CALF within the last proper auction to make money. At least he has a sense of humour I suppose.

Anyways at the end of the documentary the market goes belly up and for some reason you start thinking of tulips in Amsterdam and did anyone ever read a history book. On a less angry note there was a cracking programme on poetry (whoever thought) featuring the work of George Makay Brown who I was ignorant of until last night but after the opening lines of Hamnavoe I was caught. Seemingly its on the national curriculum across the water so maybe its not looked on as kindly over there (something akin to lots of us pretty much hating Yeats).

Moving away from an attempt at a critique of modern society and art ( Poetry good, modern art rubbish, I call it a caveman review) I have started using spotify and it is the business. Go to England buy yourself an office and install a server if needs must to access the site. Never again will an album be bought in the dark although that does take the whole romance out of the ritual of cd shopping.

After plummeting the depths of art and soaring with poetry only one song is appropriate. The Well and The Lighthouse (see what I did there, its almost, almost, a metaphor)

Tree Hugging

Still waiting for spotify to get it's ass in gear and allow us Irish to sign up to there free service. All in all it looks pretty cool but I just can't be arsed going through a proxy so as to spoof my I.P. address being in the UK. Anyways its unpatriotic which is always a good way to justify laziness as Mr. Chomsky would point out in any of his books. Speaking of him, with Hegemony or Survival, those predictions haven't really worked out, and his hope for some mass sixties style popular stand hasn't materialised, especially in these days of Twitter which appears to be far more successfully utilised in demonstrations in Moldova than here, although it appears the student population of Moldova don't confuse appathy with patriotism.

That tangent was brought courtesy of the fact that spotify is not available here, which is like Hulu and that music yoke that the pitchfork have on their site. Are we living in the fupping stone age here or whats the story?

God damn licensing agreement, no wonder everyone went to pirate bay, who also are trying to convince us that the Swedish (as a race) have a tradition in file sharing! C'mon for fuck sake, who has a tradition of file sharing???? I haven't read one history book that highlights the Swedish love of filing cabnets, for matches yes (built a shagging empire on it) but filing cabnets no!!

So after all that its quiet obvious that the mood aint so hot (could also be explained that after finishing work the first song I heard on the radio was Bryan Adams: Heaven, yikes). So to cheer me and everyone else up I think some Polyphonic Spree is required and Light and Day.... Lets not have a concert, lets have a gathering. Maybe Chomsky was onto something with this tree hugging lark! Finally based on the evidence of the video, having a laugh in Japan at concerts appears to be banned or something.

Bukowski Quote of The Day

To keep up the pretence of being cultured, I bring a Bukowski quote for the day (I haven't figured out yet if I'm being sarcastic/ironic or pretentious)

"There is nothing
so
boring
as
immortality"

Makes you think doesn't it. Answers on a postcard or at least the comments section.

That It Is, Is The Mystical

Darwin's Angel by John Cornwell is a riposte to Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion where Cornwell attempts to show up some of the inconsistencies of Dawkin's central thesis by way of a guardian angel. Now after writing that opening summary, I'm trying to figure out why anyone should read the book, its sounds about as grounded as a kestrel on speed. But if you give it a chance it actually works and begins to break down some of the certainty associated with the God Delusion by cleverly using the work of people ranging from Wittgenstein to the spiritually tortured philosopher/mathematician Pascal.

The book however isn't blatantly religious if one is going on the narrower definition of the word and is far less dogmatic and stringent that the Dawkin's atheist vibe. Anyways my head seriously hurts after all that profound thinking, and I thought first mover only ever referred to commerce and was just reference in a Michael Porter paper from the eighties and bob's your uncle. How wrong I was!!!

So after getting that book off the shelf I was tempted to play If God Was One of Us or the SouthPark Faith +1 Christian Rock Band, but I resisted, instead I went for Placebo and Running Up That Hill, mainly because I just couldn't inflict Kate Bush generally prancing around the place on anyone.

Also a band called Placebo singing about god, the irony is delicious.

They Don't Make Em Like They Used To

Now this is quality programming. Jim Henson and the Fraggle Rock crew going all neo-platonic on us and creating a genuinely emotional piece of children's television.

Philosophy Hurts My Head

I'm currently trying to read Bertrand Russell and a "History of Western Philosophy" and it really is a struggle. This is supposed to be entry level stuff and really my head is done in from it all. It's like a self help book but without the answers, its funny but still sixty percent of it goes over my head. I suppose there was always going to be difficulty in drawing a line from Plato through Descarte to Kant. That is even ignoring the more modern stuff such as Gray and Dawkins to name but a few. So far all I can make out is that by staring at a steeple for a while the human race can make a leap forward in understanding what it means to exist. Insightful stuff!

Anyway it has got me thinking about what should music really say to us, okay so it didn't, I was looking for any tenuous link from philosophy to music without mentioning Wagner or The Beetles trip to India. Should there be a spiritual side to the whole thing or is it enough to write about broken hearts and getting wasted. Are there any real philosopher type artists out there in mainstream music that write about the human condition? Who is challenging what we perceive to be reality? Is this just a load of bollocks and we spend too long sitting around just thinking about or on the other hand is this just an argument to stop us questioning and quiet happily go with the flow? It's a Pandora's box when you get into this material.

So this got me thinking, what songs are out there that have pushed us to think a little bit deeper and not just hum, "I kissed a girl and I liked it". One thing for sure is Thomas Aquinas I am not. So here is what I've come up with... Modern music meets a couple of thousand years of philosophical debate. God bless (if he exists, hedge my bets ala Pascal) the Internet.

British Seapower "Atom"
Modest Mouse "Bukowski"
Neil Young "After the Goldrush"
The Pixies "Where Is My Mind"
I really should have thought out this list before I posted but this is all I got.