Tag: iona

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Bruce Cockburn at Toronto Live 8

Finally – been looking for this all day, waiting for it to come round on the AOL stream of the Toronto Live 8 gig.

He started with ‘If I Had A Rocket Launcher’, then went into ‘Call It Democracy’, followed by a fantastic lil’ speech, into ‘Waiting For A Miracle’.

His speech bit started with him mentioning that so much of the nay-saying about dropping debts and providing aid revolves around discussion of corrupt despotic leaders,

“Those corrupt leaders have been historically propped up in the position they’re in by the same countries, the G8 countries, that we’re addressing today, so now is the time to make ourselves heard,”

Anyway, here’s the lyrics to ‘Call It Democracy’ – an hymn to the death of the IMF, if ever there was one. It would’ve been great to have Bruce in London singing this as the centre-piece to the whole gig. Ah well.

Call It Democracy – Bruce Cockburn

Padded with power here they come
International loan sharks backed by the guns
Of market hungry military profiteers
Whose word is a swamp and whose brow is smeared
With the blood of the poor

Who rob life of its quality
Who render rage a necessity
By turning countries into labour camps
Modern slavers in drag as champions of freedom

Sinister cynical instrument
Who makes the gun into a sacrament —
The only response to the deification
Of tyranny by so-called “developed” nations’
Idolatry of ideology

North South East West
Kill the best and buy the rest
It’s just spend a buck to make a buck
You don’t really give a flying fuck
About the people in misery

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there’s one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt

See the paid-off local bottom feeders
Passing themselves off as leaders
Kiss the ladies shake hands with the fellows
Open for business like a cheap bordello

And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy
And they call it democracy

See the loaded eyes of the children too
Trying to make the best of it the way kids do
One day you’re going to rise from your habitual feast
To find yourself staring down the throat of the beast
They call the revolution

IMF dirty MF
Takes away everything it can get
Always making certain that there’s one thing left
Keep them on the hook with insupportable debt
Notes

Commenting on the song, written in the early 80s, at a gig in 2000, Bruce said:

“That song came from the time of neo-conservatism, when governments supported business at the cost of lives and nobody gave a shit. We have since moved on to neo-liberalism, when governments support business at the cost of lives and nobody gives a shit; and I see we’re moving on to neo-feudalism, that’s the service economy coming at you. We will all serve. I’m not quite sure who we’re serving. There’s a sort of mystery there; are we serving Bill Gates? I think not, he’s too visible. Somebody else? Maybe you’re sitting right here (in the audience). Are you out there? Fuck off, if you are. (positive audience response) And if you’re not, well we missed a grand opportunity to level with each other.”

If you want to get the song, it was originally on World Of Wonders, was also on Bruce’s late-80s best-of ‘Waiting For A Miracle’, but my favourite version is on his late-80s live album, just called ‘Bruce Cockburn Live’, on Cooking Vinyl.

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my subbuteo-geek childhood…

So last time I visited my mum, she handed me two boxes of my crap that had been cluttering her house up for the last 14 years. The first one of which is full of Subbuteo stuff. For the unitiated, Subbuteo was a table football game, where you flicked little blokes at a ball, and tried to score before your younger brother sat on the fragile little blokes and broke them all –

Here’s a Subbuteo man –

and here’s what geeks like teenage-stevie looked like playing it –

So what to do with all this stuff? I clearly don’t want it. A few of the teams seem to be fetching a couple of quid on Ebay, but I’m not even sure I can be bothered to list them. I might just take them over to my local charity shop. The boxes for each team aren’t in good enough nick for collectors, and the occasional team appears to be meeting government requirements regarding equal opportunities, by having at least one player who’s been broken off at the legs and stuck back on with whatever sticky stuff came to hand (a plaster is the most fitting I’ve found so far!)

Back in the day, I was a full on Subbuteo nut – my brother and I had grandstands, floodlights, and other weirdness, and the range of teams I’ve got here goes from obvious ones like Wimbledon and Man U through to Vancouver Whitecaps and a team of subbuteo blokes in yellow tracksuits, presumably for warming up!! Did my geekery know no bounds??

Aha! And I’ve just found my pride and joy – a ‘wide arms’ goalie – normal goalies were long and thin, and you could get squat looking goalies in the interchangable goalie sets. But wide arms goalie was like the Subbuteo version of Pat Jennings – an inch-high force to be reckoned with, who somehow avoided being sat on, so remains intact to this day.

If any of you know any subbuteo geeks who’d like all this stuff, do let me know. I’m not planning on keeping it for long (unless anyone fancies coming round for a game… doh! I’ve not got the pitch anymore, unless it’s the other box of clutter from mum…!)

Soundtrack – Tommy Sims, ‘Peace And Love’.

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A fine looking new magazine…

From a former editor of Adbusters comes Geez Magazine – their strapline is “a new magazine thatserves a politically-charged readership at the fringes of faith.” and their mandate says

“Geez magazine has set up camp on the fringes of faith. It is a refuge and inspiration for people of restless faith and blessed instinct.

It is welcome relief for over-churched souls who are ready for compassionate, resistant and spiritually viable ways of living in our world.”

Sounds like a great premise for a mag, even moreso in the US where left-leaning Christians have been without a voice for so many years.

check it out.

Soundtrack – John Zorn, ‘Naked City’.

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More of file sharing and the multi-nationals

From BBC news –

“The US Supreme Court has ruled that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.”

This was apparently a surprise, because a similar case happened with the advent of home videos, where people could record off the TV. Then, the ruling went in favour of the Video manufacturers.

This time, I guess because the inventors of grokster, morpheus, limewire etc. aren’t mulitnationals themselves, the increasingly erroneous US Supreme Court have ruled in favour of the millionaires.

Now, the interesting thing here is, does this mean I can now sue Sony if someone uses a Sony CDR to copy one of my CDs? Of course not, because Sony have more money than me, so naturally they are in the right. But it’d be a fun test-case – I’m sure I could argue quite convincingly that they were facilitating the exchange, at least as much as limewire facilitate the downloading of my MP3s. Limewire can be used for legal exchange as well as illegal.

But no, Sony were happy to sell CDRs, because then they were making the money. The artists weren’t, but who gives a shit about artists? They claim to, but clearly don’t. When the blank CDR/cassette/video market became an obvious source of funds, they stopped protesting and started making blank media. At least they’d make the money. if you had shares in Sony, you’d still win, even if the artists they claim to care about so much didn’t make anything.

But file sharing is different. No-one’s making any money off it. The programs are free, the files are exchanged for free. So because they can’t take over, the prosecute. Any illusion of recourse to the law is pure BS. It’s all about control, nothing to do with artist’s rights. How many of these companies are fighting for fair trade laws? How many are fighting for the rights of people who work in CD plants across the developing world. No, they are talking about hardworking pop-stars, who might not make that extra few million quid, about hard working video directors, who might have to start charging as little as $200,000 for a three week shoot, instead of their customary cool million.

If anyone is wasting the artist’s money it’s the labels. The deception is huge, and the logic flawed. Who is going to get the money when the file sharers are sued? The artists? the little labels, the little venues? yeah, right. More money for the multi-nationals. That’s what the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll is all about.

Bollocks to them all.

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Read this book.

Last night I finished one of the greatest works of non-fiction I’ve ever read.

I first heard about ‘Father Joe – The Man Who Saved My Soul’ when its writer, Tony Hendra, was interviewed on Danny Baker’s show on BBC London. My interest was piqued because Tony played Ian Faith in Spinal Tap, and Danny declared it straight away to be one of the greatest books he’d ever read.

As the interview went on, it became clear that Father Joe was an extraordinary character. He was a Benedictine monk at Quarr Abbey on the Isle Of Wight, off the south cost of England, who Tony met when he almost had an affair with a married woman, at the age of 14, and was sent to Joe for penance. Thus began a lifelong friendship, the story of which unfolds in the book, bought for me a few weeks ago by TSP.

It’s a truly remarkable story – Tony’s story in many ways is similar to a lot of people in the media – one of vocation, compromise, and hurting the ones nearest to you. The big difference is that always in the background are his visits to Quarr Abbey, and letters from Father Joe.

The end of the book is utterly heart-breaking. I finished it on the tube last night, and I’ve never sobbed on the tube before now – the odd tear as a sad part of a book, but never like this. I’m rather glad the train was pretty much empty.

When I got where I was going, I must’ve looked like I had the world’s worst hayfever, with my swollen red eyes…

Anyway, buy it, please. It’s amazing. A life-affirming, heart-warming inspirational story.

oh, and we SO need to get Tony Hendra for Greenbelt – The Cheat, get onto it.

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CD piracy…

So, 1 in 3 CDs sold worldwide is a pirate copy. I wonder how that stacks up against the percentages of money made by record companies vs artists. Are the pirates ripping off the labels more than the labels are ripping off the artists? I suspect not.

From the article –

“Jorgen Larsen, president of music producer Universal Music International, said the livelihood of the artists and music industry workers was at risk if piracy continued to rise.”

I think the livelihood of the artists is put more at risk by signing to Universal than it is from piracy. I very much doubt anyone is bootlegging my CDs. In fact, I’d be slightly flattered if they were. I’m sure there are some CDR copies kicking around, and I hope that they inspire the owners to turn up to gigs. There’s certainly enough MP3 material of mine around to make up a whole CD of extras (moreso if you’re in the street team), but people still buy the CDs, come to the gigs, and everything’s ticking along quite nicely. I’m certainly more scared of one day having a breakdown and accidentally signing a record deal than I am of discovering 100,000 copies of Grace And Gratitude for sale in a Delhi street market – in fact, if they did, I’d probably just go and do a gig there!

Perhaps the markup on CDs is to blaim? If the labels are still trying to charge £16 a CD to music buyers in India/China/Mexico etc, how on earth do they expect them to come up with that kind of money? Maybe they should look at ways of making it more attractive to buy the real thing, rather than just blaiming the pirates for filling a gap in the market. If the record companies weren’t so obviously rapacious in their dealings with artists, and such a rip-off in terms of what they charge the end user, then people might feel more generously disposed towards them. How about if they started to give away 20% of their profits to arts projects in developing countries?

No, instead they blame ‘organised crime’ – I’d be interested to see the evidence for this. It’s quite possible that ‘organised crime’ units are somehow involved, but it’s equally possible that there are a bunch of opportunists who see a gap in the market created by the greed of the majors.

It’s like the Metallica/Napster debacle – I, along with 10 million other people, found it very hard to feel much sympathy for the multi-millionaire Lars Ulrich in his claims that he was being ripped off by Napster. If every single item of Metallica merch was fair trade, if they were pressuring their record company to encourage staff to unionise and putting pressure on for fairer wages around the world, if they implimented a scheme in Metallica PLC where the top paid person could only earn 9 times what the lowest paid person could earn, I’d be feeling a little more generous towards his claims that kids in colleges downloading Metallica albums were destroying his livelihood.

Soundtrack – Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder, ‘Talking Timbuktu’ (heard a piece on Radio 4 last night about Ali, and dug out this CD again – fantastic stuff – brings back marvellous memories of sitting at Rick Turner‘s house in Santa Cruz, discovering amazing new music from around the world, and listening to Rick’s remarkable stories.)

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Celebs in need of a wake up call…

OK, so Oprah Winfrey was stopped from going into a paris shop after-hours because they were getting ready for some press thing. No big deal? Not to Oprah. According to ‘a friend’, it was “one of the most humiliating moments of her life”.

Hold on – so not being treated like a puffed up overblown star demanding luxury and special treatment is ‘humiliating’. How about being stopped and searched for just for being black? How about being forcibly strip searched, or arrested and tortured? How about suffering from panic attacks or epilepsy and having an attack in a crowded place?

Good God, how to these celeb losers sleep at night??? How can anyone get worked up over not being let into a chic shop? So you can’t get in – so what, it was closed anyway!! Ah, but you’re Oprah. Sorry, nobody still gives a shit.

another choice quote –

‘Winfrey’s friend Ms King said the TV presenter has no intention of shopping at Hermes again.

“Her position is ‘I will shop where people appreciate my business, and I don’t believe that any longer includes Hermes’,” she added.’

Oh please! just PISS OFF. No-one wants to hear multi-millionaires whinging about not getting the star treatment, you sad out-of-touch waste of oxygen! Go and work in a homeless shelter or do relief work for a few months to get some perspective, you tragic spoilt showbiz mannequin!

Loser of the week, methinks…

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The smokescreen of Debt Cancellation

This is all getting very murky.

the G8 have pledged $50 million dollars in debt relief for Africa.

Sounds good? Yes, of course. Until you start to break it down. Firstly, it only goes to 18 countries – lots more needed. Secondly, it’s condition on ‘economic reforms’ in the country, under the IMF’s HIPC scheme, which require increasing privatisation and opening up of nationalised industries and services to outside tender (guaranteeing that american and european companies get to start syphoning money out of those countries again, in return for provide water, energy, transport infrastructure as a profit making venture – now call me naive, but surely in a situation where poverty is as rife as it is in those 18 countries, the last thing they need to be worrying about is their water supply breaking down or being held to ransom because the share-holders of the parent company aren’t making enough?? That’s as bad as being in the debts they are already in.

It’s so galling that the twin evils of the IMF and World Bank go around telling countries how to run their economic affairs to the advantage of the rich. This is why trade law reform is THE big issue for the Make Poverty History campaign. Debt relief is all well and good, but if the cancellations are off-set against falling aid packages and industrial contracts to outside investors, they’re still utterly screwed.

The bottom line is, a share-holder based economic model is never going to favour the poor. It can’t, it is institutionally programmed to reward those with more money for their investments, to protect their investments from doo-gooders who seek to put the wellbeing of the stake-holders ahead of the balance sheet of the share-holders. It’s evil, pernicious and it needs to be challenged before anything is going to change substantially for the world’s poor.

If you are a share holder, use your power and vote at the company AGM to push for reforms. That’s the only way things can change on a company level – the directors and managers of a company are legally bound to maximise investors profits above all else. So they can’t even start to use recycled office paper unless it saves money or it’s cleared by a vote. So vote.

And if you don’t own any shares (I don’t, and never will) support co-operatives instead – organisations that operate on a stake-holder basis, where decisions are made considering the effects those decisions will have on all affected, not just those with a financial interest.

Debt cancellation is a wonderful thing, I’m glad it’s been announced, but I hope it becomes part of a MUCH bigger package of reforms, cos right now, it’s not making anyone’s poverty history.

and while we’re on the subject, consider this t-shirt, from Philosophy Football –

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Noel doesn't get it…

World reknown and respected political commentator, Noel Gallagher, has been criticising the Live8 gig.

He says,

‘Are they hoping one of these guys from the G8 … sees Annie Lennox singing ‘Sweet Dreams’ and thinks, “Fuck me, she might have a point there, you know.” It’s not going to fucking happen, is it?’

Oh dear – he’s never been the sharpest tool in the box, but does he really thing that the idea of having the bands on is that they themselves will persuade G8 leaders to change things? Does he not see the importance of raising the issue, of building a worldwide pressure build-up of public support for changes in a brutally unjust world trade system?

He’s clearly even more stupid that I thought. He’s being interviewed by The Observer, there’s a bunch of his peers doing what they can to raise awareness about justice issues, taking the mad existence that is pop superstardom and attempting to channel some of that spotlight onto the plight of the world’s poor, and he uses his platfom in a national newspaper to launch an ill-conceived attack on the aims…

So this week’s berk of the week award goes to Mr G.

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