Culture

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Framing “The Gatekeepers”

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This was originally published on Raymond Deane’s blog, the Deanery on the 16th of May.

As everyone knows by now, The Gatekeepers is a 2012 Academy award-nominated documentary film made by the Israeli director Dror Moreh. Moreh succeeded in interviewing the last six heads of Israel’s General Security Services, better known by its Hebrew acronym Shin Bet. These gentlemen display considerable frankness about the nature of their past activities, their belated advocacy of a two-state solution to the Palestine issue and their negative views of successive Israeli governments.

It’s not my purpose here to write another review of this much talked-about but surprisingly uncontroversial film. Interesting articles, both of which discuss it in conjunction with the Israeli/Palestinian film 5 Broken Cameras, may be read here and here. Instead, I wish to reflect on some worrisome aspects of the film’s framing and reception in public discourse, and to suggest that its propagandistic effect is dependent on such framing.

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Full-Sized Life

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A story by Susan Millar DuMars

Luke swallowed the bird on a cold, clear December night – trees of bone, the river in a silver-black sulk. He’d waved off a taxi, needing the air after all those back-slapping pints. Crossing the bridge toward the cathedral, he thought how the dome at night was a great green helmet; the windows, unreadable eyes. He remembered funerals, several, in the past year. Muttering responses to prayers, following the coffin out slow and stiff-legged. Luke crossed himself without knowing he did it. As his hand fell it brushed the old stone banister of the bridge and he thought for a moment of the river beneath him, God and Death in front of him. Himself suspended in a comfortable middle age. How lucky. How very lucky.

Though even as he plumped and pinked with a sense of good fortune, another voice inside him contradicted. “Earned! Surely, earned.” He lifted his other arm and gazed at what he clutched. The book. His book. Bringer of Light: The Life and Poems of Malachy Flynn. Launched into the world this evening in a modest, yet satisfying, ceremony.

The applause had been warm and lasting. Loyola had beamed. Afterward, in the pub, many pints of Erdinger were bought him. Loyola had drunk half an orange juice and had driven herself home to prepare a late supper. He’d promised to be home before the meat turned tough.

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Progressive Film Club, Sat 27th of April, Labour Rights and Immigrant Workers

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Progressive Film Club – at the New Theatre · 43 East Essex Street · Dublin 2 · Saturday 27th of April

Labour Rights and Immigrant Workers

Admission free. (Donations welcome.)

2 p.m.
Irish premiere

Living as Brothers (2012)

Living as Brothers looks at the lives of Jamaican migrant workers toiling in the orchards of Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada. In their own words, these men, some of whom have been returning for more than twenty years, tell of the second life they have created for themselves in Canada, the reasons for their making this journey, and their struggles at home in rural Jamaica. Told over a season of picking fruit, their story is arduous, stressful, and precarious, one that offers few second chances. · Produced and directed by Kevin Fraser.

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Alternative Proposals

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Alternative Proposals

“the Fine Gael health minister proposes a panel of two obstetricians

and four psychiatrists – one of whom must be a perinatal psychiatrist –

to assess a woman who is seeking an abortion on the grounds of suicide

ideation…there are only three perinatal psychiatrists in the country”

The Sunday Times, April 21st, 2013

 

Any woman of child bearing hips,

unfortunate enough to find herself

alive on the patch of weeds between Muff

and Kilmuckridge, or Skibbereen

and Hackballs Cross, must,

to have her baby/babies

legally abhorted, obtain, before she kills her

self, without bribery or offer of

sexual favours, the signatures

of six former members

of the Irish National Liberation Army;

six personal friends of Shane Ross;

six random guys shouting

obscenities in the street;

six women from Barna

who thought Michael D’s speech

last week to the European Parliament

was absolutely marvellous;

six Sean Nós dancers in residence

at accredited universities,

six plumbers who’ll definitely be there

first thing Tuesday morning,

six Dutch guys from Doolin

who make their own clogs, or

six ex-members of the pop group

Six.

 

KEVIN HIGGINS

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A gombeen-Nation Once Again

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Here’s an extract from an article on Gom’beenism by Conor McCabe, which Rabble published in their great community print magazine and have now provided online. To help keep Rabble magazine in print please support their fundit campaign.

Gombeen (g?m ‘bi:n). Anglo-Irish. Usury. Chiefly attrib., as Gombeen-Man, a money-lender, usurer; so also gombeen-woman. Hence gom’beenism, the practice of borrowing or lending at usury.

The 19th-century term Gom’beenism, the practice of borrowing or lending at usury, is increasingly referenced in relation to Ireland’s domestic economic practices. Conor McCabe takes a look at the history of the Irish middleman and argues that they haven’t gone away.

On Tuesday 3 January 1882 the nobility and landed gentry of Ireland met in Dublin to discuss the future of the island. Among those present was R.J. Mahony, a landowner from Kerry. He stood and said that the recently-passed land act would be the ruin not only of the landlords but of the small farmer as well. He explained that as soon as the landlord class was put out of the way, another would come along to take their place.‘The merchant, the trader, the usurer, the gombeen man,’ said Mahony, were ‘the future rulers of the land.’ Mr. Mahony called these the middlemen, and although he may have had his reasons for defending landlordism, his warnings were not without foundation. Forty years later the middleman were in the ascendancy and set about carving the newly-independent free state in their image – and we’ve been living with the consequences of that ever since.

Just who were these middlemen? In an article published in 1982 Michael D. Higgins wrote that the mainstream image of the period – and the one taught at secondary level – was one of poor small farmers fighting against perfidious, foreign landlords. However, what was glossed over in such a black and white analysis was that there was another struggle – a class struggle – going on, one that involved small farmers and the rancher/grazier families. These large rancher farmers fattened cattle for export, and occasionally they were the local shopkeepers, the arbiters of credit in the community, and the dispensers of loans. It gave them significant societal influence and power. Not all shopkeepers were graziers, of course, but neither one was the friend of the smallholder. The social relations which underpinned Irish rural society were not only framed by land, but by credit: those who needed it, and those who profited from it. And in the north and west of Ireland, it was the Irish entrepreneurial spirit of the middleman and his gombeen cousin that held sway over credit.

Read the rest here.

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The Charge of the Trite Brigade

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The Charge of the Trite Brigade

By Altered lord Tenement

Half a plague, half intrigue,

Half a rogue honoured.

All in the alley of debt

Strode the quick hungered

Homeward, the trite brigade!

Charge for the goods he said:

Into the alley of debt

Strode the quick hungered

Homeward, the trite brigade!

Was there a deputy dismay’d?

Not tho’ the elders knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Their’s not to give the eye,

Their’s not to clean the sty,

Their’s but to milk and vie:

Down a blind alley of debt

Strode the quick hungered.


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The Iron Lady

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First Book of Frags is being launched on Saturday 20th of April at 8 O'Clock in McGrattans Bar on Talbot Street with a introduction by Sean O'Reilly and a gala night of performance featuring Dave Lordan, Karl Parkinson and many more of Dublin's top spoken word artists.

The Iron Lady, below is taken from the new book.

The embedded video is another Frag, The F**king Titanic read by me using footage from the film 'A Night To Remember' (1958). The video was created by the film-maker Eamonn Crudden

According to Mel Ulm of The Reading Life, First Book of Frags is amazing, almost flabbergastingly original.

“Dave Lordan’s First Book of Frags is experimental work of an accessible kind – unsentimental, original.[...] a wry sensibility throughout, reminiscent of the early stories of Peter Carey.” — Patrick Chapman

 

The Iron Lady

When the Iron Lady died we melted her down immediately.

After some debate (coinage, medals, spearheads, a unique musical instrument, an elaborate candlestand…?) we decided to divide her and use her to make five Alloy Ladies.

These were the Cast Iron Lady, the Pig Iron lady, the Celestium Lady, Lady Cobalt and the Lady of Ferrovanadium.

We placed an Alloy Lady on a special display pedestal at each one of our Starfort’s five points and floodlit them from below. They were martial hallucinations, ethereal and terrifyi.ng.

The Alloy Ladies were taken by many of our citizens to be representations of cult deities; unofficial grottoes sprung up. These were always garlanded with fresh rose and hydrangea bouquets, perfumed with jasmine and incense, illumined by the flames of gigantic votive candles. Some citizens started leaving notes of supplication, as well as coins and other wish-offerings, but this was put a stop to as it was untidy, attracted petty criminals, and generated mendicancy.

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Progressive Film Club: Venezuelan Stories: In honour of Hugo Chávez, Sat, 13th April @2.30, New Theatre, Temple Bar

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Progressive Film Club at the New Theatre · 43 East Essex Street · Dublin 2

Presents

Venezuelan Stories: In honour of Hugo Chávez

Saturday 13th of April

2:30 p.m.

Admission free. (Donations welcome.)

Tocar y Luchar [To Play and to Struggle] (2006)

The captivating story of the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra System—an incredible network of hundreds of orchestras formed in most of Venezuela’s towns and villages. Designed to bring the wonders of music to rural children, the system has become one of the most important, and most beautiful, social phenomena in modern history. To Play and to Struggle is an inspirational story of courage, determination, ambition, and love—a fitting tribute to the memory of Hugo Chávez.

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An Anarchist Noel Coward? The World Turned Upside Down – Rosselsongs 1960-2010

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Music Review: The World Turned Upside Down – Rosselsongs 1960-2010

And then the ‘political songwriter’ label can mislead into the belief that I’m writing songs in order to change the world… I have to point out that after fifty years of writing songs, the world’s in a worse state now than when I started, although I don’t blame myself entirely for that. - Leon Rosselson

Why is the English singer-songwriter Leon Rosselson, now almost eighty years old, not a “household name”?

In the entertaining, informative and argumentative liner notes accompanying this 2011 set of four CDs he repeatedly muses on how, in his own words, he “failed to become rich and famous”. Concerning the celebrated title song, World Turned Upside Down, he writes: “Some people think it’s a folk song. Or that it was written by Billy Bragg. Which is, I suppose, fame of a sort.”

Success, he tells us, “should have happened in the 1960s… There was the folk boom, the singer-songwriter boom.” At the same time, however, “my songwriting style didn’t fit comfortably into the folk bag. Or any other bag, if it comes to that.” And anyway, “the alternative culture was big business, the musicians were bought into superstardom by lucrative record contracts, …the message ‘liberate your minds’ turned out to be both politically safe and eminently saleable… The guerrillas had simply, without their even realising it, been incorporated into the regular army of the enemy.” His songs The Ugly Ones (“the fetishizing of the beautiful people”) and Flower Power = Bread (from the fateful year 1968) savaged ‘60s values, thus ensuring that Rosselson would not be thus incorporated but also, perhaps, that stardom on 1960s terms would elude him.

Another factor that may have militated against Rosselson’s popular success is the self-confessed absence of love-songs from his output (“love, a word that has rarely passed my songwriting pen”). Instead, he has specialised in what he calls “relationship songs” entailing “a sideways look at love, sex, marriage, relationships and angst…”, here represented by Do You Remember?, Invisible Married Breakfast Blues (inspired by Brel and Prévert), Let Your Hair Hang Down, and the wonderful Not Quite, But Nearly. Jacques Brel’s example taught Rosselson that “[y]ou could write songs by pretending to be someone else, by adopting a persona.” Here the feminist principle that “the personal is political, the political personal” provided the rationale, but perhaps in an age when “letting it all hang out” was the order of the day this approach was too oblique.

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Desiring Hegel

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Book Review: Subjects of Desire, Judith Butler (Columbia University Press, 2012) and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Stephen Houlgate (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Originally published in 1987, this new edition reflects the renewal of interest in Hegel and the overcoming of the obstacle that has for so long bedevilled an appreciation of his tremendous philosophical achievement. The obstacle is the label that has attached itself to Hegel as the omnivorous philosopher of totality, the thinker who espouses the holy grail of a final and all-encompassing state that unites thought and reality. The rejection of this prevalent view is the basis for Butler’s understanding of Hegel as a philosopher of antagonism who recognises the impossibility of a grand and harmonious reconciliation between knowledge and the subject. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit details the journey of the subject attempting to reach a point where its sought-after plenitude and knowledge of the world are at one, but this is a journey defined by its failure. The absolute is the recognition of failure and of the inherent antagonism that robs being of the oneness that it would wish to embody. The satisfaction that is sought is kept at bay by the restless play of negation.

What, though, is meant by the negative, where does it reside and why cannot the subject find a final satisfaction for desire? Reality as we understand it has to be seen as a construct in the sense that Kant propounded – shaped and given form by our conceptual apparatus — but there is no solid kernel resting in the background behind our horizon of meaning. There is only what Žižek describes as a ‘chaotic non-all proto reality’, the virtual multiplicities and proliferating pluralities that are evoked in the language of quantum physics. It is reality itself that is out-of-synch, riven with gaps and discontinuities, and its non-unity is the ultimate ground and truth behind the assertion that ‘there is no big Other’. Butler, writing two years before Žižek’s first major book in English (The Sublime Object of Desire) appeared on the scene, does not acknowledge or rely on such an ontology in her introductory chapters in Hegel but it helps in understanding why she lays out the ground in the way she does.

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Atheism in Ireland and the Decline of the Catholic Church

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It is generally considered a truism these days to state that from the foundation of the Republic, the Catholic Church has had a large part to play in the running of the country. Legislation was passed or defeated on the whims of Catholic interests, social norms and conventions were passed down from the pulpit to the worshippers in the pews, and most shamefully, thousands of women and children were forced into what was essentially slave labour in the country’s Industrial Schools and Magdalene Laundries. However, the attitude of many towards the Church has changed dramatically over the last twenty or so years, no doubt caused by the revelations of what went on in the Industrial Schools, Magdalene Laundries, along with the revelations of a vast conspiracy to cover up allegations of physical and sexual abuse of children being carried out by members of the clergy. The Church as an institution, for all its posturing statements over the last number of years, will have to do something drastic if it is to recover from the various scandals that have hit it and continue to do so. One can clearly chart its decline in some of the latest figures regarding religious worship in Ireland.

In the 2011 census, a total of 3,861,335 people, 81.4 per cent of the population, declared themselves as Catholic, a 4.9 per cent increase since the 2006 census, when 3,681,446 people identified themselves as such. Yet, regarding this increase, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) stated, “that while the number of Catholics overall increased by 179,889, or 4.9 per cent, since 2006 much of this increase came from the non-Irish (mostly European) national community.” On the other hand, those identifying as having no religion increased by 45 per cent, up from 186,318 in 2006, to 269,811 in 2011. When broken down further in a separate CSO document, 72,914 did not state their religion, or lack of, with another 3,905 and 3,521 people stating Atheist and Agnostic respectively as their religion. As anyone remotely familiar with the religious demographics of Ireland will tell you though, the number of “true Catholics” is likely to be far smaller than the 81.4 per cent noted in the 2011 census. This can be seen in a range of areas.

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Dave Lordan’s New Short Story Collection: First Book of Frags

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Dave Lordan has a new collection of stories coming out called First Book of Frags, published by Wurm Press. You can pre-order copies here.

A book of explosive short fiction from the author of The Boy in the Ring and Invitation to a Sacrifice. First Book of Frags is a projectile flung at convention, capital, and ultimately, civilisation itself.

Some early reactions….

“A new form brings a new kind of fury. Pitched somewhere between the short story and the narrative poem, Frags delivers fragments and stark narrative incisions knitted together by a darkly satirical and formally challenging twenty-first century tone of political urgency. Frags shows up the jaded politico-economic media excursus on the recession and its discontents for the white noise that it is. Whether it is the Orwellian “Street Party”, the vitriolic David Foster Wallace-like “Living in Ikea”, the Beckettian Irish stew of “A Bone”, or the Bolanoesque “Dr. Essler’s Cocaine” the crafted howl of Frags rarely lets up. Cathleen Ni Houlihan is a scavenging Kathleen who sleeps on a “rained on mattress in the woods surrounded by empty wine bottles,” the Iron Lady has been melted down, and Ireland’s Kafkaesque educated unemployed who ponder justice have been transformed into flies, not cockroaches. Dave Lordan’s surreal yet scathing sketches of suffering, violence and ear-splitting silence should capture the hungry imagination of a disillusioned majority.” — Michael O’Sullivan

“echoes of James Joyce and Angela Carter”–Nuala Ní Chonchuir

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Theatre Review: Olwen Fouéré Performing Book 4 of Finnegan’s Wake at Centre Culturel Irelandais, Paris

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Theatre Review: Olwen Fouéré, riverrun, (Book 4 of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake), Centre Culturel Irelandais, Paris, February 8-9

Many's the more than million readers who bravely started on the journey “riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us…” and perhaps made it as far as the terrible, multilingual thunder bolt announcing the Fall of Man

(bababadalgharaghtakam

minarronkonnbtonntonnerronntuonnnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntohoohoordenenthurnuk!)

before folding their tents and heading home. More's the pity because Finnegan's Wake is first and foremost a tipsy, cock-eyed, hallucinatory, verbal performance, full of trap doors and staged scenes. (No chance, really, that such a text could be published in enlightened times.)

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Progressive Film Club: Urban Finance and Suburban Sustainability, Sat 23rd of Feb, The New Theatre, Temple Bar

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The following are the upcoming showings this saturday, but check out the full program for February, March and April here.

Saturday 23rd February: Urban Finance and Suburban Sustainability

The New Theatre • 43 East Essex St Temple Bar • Dublin 2

2pm: The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (2004)
Since the Second World War, Americans have invested much of their new-found wealth in suburbia. It promised a sense of space, affordability, family life, and “upward mobility.”
As the suburban population exploded in these years, the suburban way of life become embedded in the American consciousness: it became part of the American Dream. But as we entered the 21st century, serious questions began to emerge about the sustainability of this way of life.

  • Directed by Gregory Greene.

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