Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

... blog.

Well, of course the past 12 months were taken up with much, much more than blogging, but 2002 was certainly the year in which bloggers began to make an impact on the mainstream. Writing about the Trent Lott affair, The Economist, in its current "Special Christmas Issue", says:

"The mainstream media was initially blind to his remarks perhaps because it is used to such comments. But the "blogosphere" — websites of opinion and news, first known as weblogs — denounced the remarks vigorously, and would not let up, finally forcing others to take notice."

Bloggers are terribly prone to navel gazing so before we get carried away with notions of grandeur, I?d like to relate an experience from a pre-Christmas shopping session in Dublin. I was in one of the city's finest bookstores and went upstairs to browse the computer books, which happen to be located beside the volumes on medicine. In case I'd missed out on any recent publications I asked the young assistant if he had any books on blogging. "Is that a medical condition?" he enquired of me.

An ailment, perhaps? Trent Lott would certainly consider it an aberration. It's fun, though, and it's going to become much more important in 2003, a year in which history will be made.

I hope you will continue to visit Rainy Day next year. Meanwhile, thanks for your attention in 2002.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 31 December 2002 at 1:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

ESTRAGON: "Charming spot. Inspiring prospects. Let's go." VLADIMIR: "We can't". ESTRAGON: "Why not?" VLADIMIR: "We're waiting for Godot."

The coming year will bring its share of centenaries and anniversaries but few will be as significant as next Sunday's. On 5 January 1953, the tiny Theatre de Babylon in Paris premiered a play called Waiting for Godot by the relatively unknown Irish writer Samuel Beckett. The bemused audience in the half-filled auditorium were not aware that the two-act comedy they were witnessing was altering the nature of theatre. After all, the playwright had dispensed with such conventions as character and plot. Predictably, the critics were enraged and it took years for their anger to abate. When it did, the play was seen for what it was: original and subversive.

Central to the idea of Godot is Beckett's belief that words are inadequate to express our deepest feelings. "If you really get down to disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable," he once wrote. Compared to music, he felt that words were imprecise and crude when describing emotions. That's why he felt he needed to create a new form of theatrical-linguistic expression to convey his art. "An assault against words in the name of beauty," is how he once described his work.

But Beckett didn't stop with the destruction of language. In Godot, he mercilessly demolishes our notions of time and our illusions of achievement. There's only the present, he says, and it's not so much that resistance is futile as existence is futile. "They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, and then it's night once more," declares Pozzo in Godot. Not exactly the kind of stuff that those charged with making five-year plans want to hear.

On Sunday, Dublin's Gate Theatre will stage a gala version of Waiting for Godot that is expected to be unequalled in 2003. It will then run for four weeks in honour of the Dubliner who thought in new dimensions.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 30 December 2002 at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wouldn't like to let the year ebb away without recalling that 50 years ago, the great John Cage "wrote" his 4' 33'', an audacious composition comprising four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. His radical idea was that whatever sounds listeners heard during the performance constituted the music.

How interesting that two young Irish composers, Donnacha Dennehy and Jennifer Walshe selected Cage's 4' 33'' to be performed as part of their "Composer's Choice" concerts at the National Concert Hall in Dublin this year. A coincidental remembrance? Or a commentary on music, sound, noise, volume and the din of the modern world?

Ireland is no different now from other industrial societies in that daily life is filled with intrusive sounds: traffic, construction, alarms, mobile phones?.This roaring, grinding, rattling and humming is relentless and it would appear that amplification has come to be equated with emancipation. Of course, it might well be that the loudness is less and expression of confidence than one of silent fears. Perhaps people who are unsure about their direction use sound as a barrier (the aggressive thump-thump emanating from that fellow commuter's Walkman) or as a comforter (supermarket Vivaldi). Perhaps some up-and-coming composers can use these developments to build on what John Cage achieved in 1952.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 29 December 2002 at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's December 1943, Europe is in flames and Hubert Butler has submitted an article about the war in the Balkan theatre to that legendary Irish journal, The Bell. Geoffrey Taylor, the literary editor, writes back to Butler complaining of a lack of "facts" in the piece. Today's commentators, tormented by fact-checkers and pedantic editors, might benefit from studying Butler's magisterial response:

"Historical facts have that gritty, substantial feel about them only in the examination schools and their too-expensive purlieus. I discard them as building material because they are really too plastic to use except as ornaments. For example, in a small state like Yugoslavia you could get a purely factual account of its creation from a dozen representative citizens, Croat, Bosnian, Slovene, Macedonian, etc., or from representatives of the various economic and religious cross-sections, and each would give a different but quiet truthful picture. When Yugoslavia comes to be reorganized, facts will be so cogent and clamorous and innumerable that they will be used just as seasoning to the theoretic puddings made by the powers. Subjective considerations will weigh the most, shaped by the views current at the time."

As Roy Foster points out in The Irish Story: Telling Tales And Making It Up In Ireland: "The prescience of this does not need to be emphasized. It shows Butler at a dark and uncertain period in the history of his century, looking forward as well as back with that blend of tough realism which he would come to make his own."

So, the next time someone torments you for "facts", tell them about their use in the "theoretic puddings made by the powers". That should conclude the matter, promptly, and in your favour, too.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 28 December 2002 at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the nicest presents Santa brought me this year was The Irish Story: Telling Tales And Making It Up In Ireland by Roy Foster. The Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford writes elegantly and wittily about a country that continues to stimulate and exasperate, to entertain and to alarm. In a dozen essays with titles such as "Selling Irish Childhoods: Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams" and "The Salamander and the Slap: Hubert Butler and His Century", Foster tackles the "national narrative" and the country's "wished-for history" with a sympathy that shows a deep understanding of the idiosyncratic Irish approach to storytelling: "A powerful oral culture, a half-lost language, the necessary stratagems of irony, collusion and misdirection which accompany a colonized culture, maybe even the long wet winter nights — all give a distinctive twist to the way Irish account for themselves."

In this volume, Foster's greatest admiration is reserved for the Kilkenny-born essayist Hubert Butler (1900-1991), whose compassionate and brilliant writing owed so much to his enlightened Protestant heritage. This was the same patrimony that inspired Yeats's historic statement during his Senate speech on divorce in 1925: "It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our Bishops in their places in discussions requiring legislation."

Unfortunately for the Irish people, it took the nation's spineless legislators almost another 70 years to reach the point where Church and State could be uncoupled, with the result that both institutions are now so tarnished that neither can enkindle affection or admiration. In 1952, Hubert Butler became one more victim of this Gaelic theocracy when he dared to raise his voice, in the presence of a papal nuncio in Dublin, against the forced conversion of Orthodox Serbs by Catholic Croats. "Government to Discuss Insult to Nuncio" ran one of the headlines the following day. Butler was denounced for having had the temerity to oppose the Catholic Church and was forced to stand down from bodies such as the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, which he had helped to re-establish. Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, True.

Today, Hubert Butler's reputation is ascending, while that of his small-minded detractors is disgraced.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 27 December 2002 at 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ireland's airwaves have been filled these past few days with pompous types blathering away about Iraq as if their opinions carried some weight. They don't, of course. The common refrain uttered by all of these is: "It's all about oil." But is it?

If it were all about oil, the world's most powerful economy could simply buy it. After all, Saddam was once very happy to sell it to Uncle Sam when he needed the dollars for his nefarious purposes.

If it were all about oil, it would certainly make more sense to buy it than to go to war for it. A cornered Iraqi thugocracy might set the wells on fire. Remember Kuwait?

If it were all about oil, and a war went badly wrong, Bush would be out of the White House in 2004.

No, if it were all about oil, the thing to do would be to buy it. So let's hear a more original argument, please.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 26 December 2002 at 1:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It was only in the fourth century that 25 December emerged as the agreed date of the Nativity. The date was chosen not because it was connected with the birth of Jesus, but because it was the Roman festival of Natalis Invicti, which marked the birth of the sun. This idea of combining the cult of Christ with the winter solstice was a stroke of genius as it coupled the celebration of the return of the sun from its apparent death on the shortest day of the year with the arrival of a new God.

Astonishingly after all these centuries, the older belief has survived because Christmas remains elementally connected with gathering around a warm fire, eating lots, hoping that the days will get longer, that the children will continue to laugh and that their parents will be granted another year. This day of deliberate collective self-indulgence expresses the real meaning of Christmas — enjoying food and drink, revelling in company and keeping the fire of life lighting.

On Christmas

And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No caroling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

John Betjeman (1906-1984)

Rainy Day wishes all its visitors a very Happy Christmas!

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 25 December 2002 at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The tin that is used for baking this cake was bought in Ballylanders, County Limerick, in the early 1950's for 2 shillings and 9 pence. It measures nine inches across. Now that Ireland has gone metric, that measurement can be expressed as 23 cm. A euro equivalent for "2 shillings and 9 pence" is harder to compute, though, as the price refers to a foreign country — a pre-decimalization Ireland of almost no disposable income, zero inflation and a tendency to regard even humble baking tins as once-in-a-lifetime purchases. But, regardless of whether you are using an antique tin or a modern one, it is vital that you line it with a double thickness of silver foil.

INGREDIENTS:
750 grams sultanas
350 grams self-raising flour
150 grams "soft" brown sugar
250 grams butter
4 tablespoons water
4 tablespoons brandy
4 eggs
1 teaspoon almond essence
pinch or two ground almonds

PREPARATION:
Put the sultanas (light-coloured ones are preferred but the darker variety will do) in a saucepan and add the water and brandy. Heat gently until the mixture begins to steam. Remove from heat and cover saucepan.

Next, place the brown sugar in your mixing bowl. Take four eggs and break each one separately in a saucer to test for quality before adding to the sugar and beat until the mix is creamy. Add a half-teaspoon of almond essence for flavour.

Gradually sieve in the flour and fold into the mix adding a few pinches of ground almonds as you go along. Remember those sultanas and brandy? Cut the butter into the steamed fruit and add to the flour, sugar and eggs in the mixing bowl.

Use the "vertical wooden spoon" test to see if the consistency of mix is suitable. If the spoon stands to attention, you are on the right track. Finish off by adding the remainder of the flour.

More lining for the tin now. This time it's greaseproof paper, folded doubly. Pour the mix into the lined tin and paste into the corners. Make a hollow with your hand in the centre to allow for expansion.

Bake at 180 degrees for twenty minutes and then at 160 for an hour. Leave in the oven and probe the centre of the cake with a knitting needle (recommended) or other sharp object until satisfied that it is baked thoroughly.

A slice is best enjoyed with a big cup of tea. If a roaring fire is at hand, as it is here, appreciate the seasonal glow.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 24 December 2002 at 1:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The newsreader on RTE Radio 1 this morning said that five heavily-armed men abducted a person last night in Ballymurphy, a Nationalist area of Belfast. In a separate incident, shots were fired into a home in a Protestant area in what's thought to be an ongoing Loyalist internecine feud. So, although political normalcy in Northern Ireland is still a vision this Christmas, the situation is far better that it was 30 years ago.

Back in 1972, the region experienced the worst year of the Troubles when 470 people were killed and the Provisional IRA emerged as a powerful force with growing popular appeal. Of all the evil deeds it masterminded that year, none was more horrible than that which took place on the bright summer morning of 31 July in the village of Claudy, County Derry, when three no-warning car-bombs exploded and killed nine people, five Catholics and four Protestants. Three of the dead were children.

Evidence has now emerged that the man who led the IRA unit responsible for the carnage was a Catholic priest, Father James Chesney. And if that wasn't bad enough, it has been revealed that his involvement in the atrocity was made know immediately to both the Catholic Church and the British government, who then colluded at the highest levels to have him quietly transferred across the border to the Republic of Ireland. He died there in 1980 aged 48.

This sacrificing of truth and the denial of justice is eerily reminiscent of what's been happening of late in the Catholic Church's sex scandals. Saving the institution is of paramount importance so the troublesome priest is transferred and the suffering of the victims is compounded by the cover up.

The Catholic Church's stock in Ireland is now so devalued that this latest blow won't do make matters much worse but it is, nevertheless, a tragedy as it will further obscure the heroic role many Catholic clerics played during the past 30 years in preventing the North from sliding into full-scale civil war. And it also diminishes the work of those priests who continue to uphold their faith. While so many of us will be sitting stuffed in front of the television this Christmas, priests be visiting the sick and the lonely and giving the Last Rites to the dying. Day after day, these same priests will sit in damp, draughty churches listening to the pathetic sins of those who need absolution.

The explosions at Claudy are still reverberating 30 years later; the shock waves caused by the implosion of the Catholic Church in Ireland will last even longer.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 23 December 2002 at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a great story from the "It-must-be-Ireland" department. Padraic Ward, proprietor of Ward's Pharmacy in Ballina, County Mayo, decided to promote the Yves St Laurent perfume Opium by placing a poster for the product in his shop window. This turned out to be a controversial move as the said poster features a life-size image of supermodel Sophie Dahl (daughter of children's story writer Roald Dahl) lying on her back and wearing nothing but an expression that says "Oh! Yeeeeeeees!"

Enter the mayor, Ray Collins. He said he'd received complaints from "a few women over the phone and some I met in town." The feeling was that the poster was offensive to women and suggestive in its pose. Mr Collins then approached Mr Ward:

"When the mayor rang and complained, for the craic I put yellow luminous paper over the model's breast and wrote 'by order of the mayor'. A huge amount had not even noticed the poster until then but after that, cars and trucks at the traffic junction up from the shop would be flashing their lights," Mr Ward told the Irish Times.

Asked whether sales of the perfume had increased as a result, Mr Ward replied:

"Probably, but what I have really noticed is that the sale of Viagra has gone through the roof so obviously this has all had a very good effect on the men of Ballina."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 22 December 2002 at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"May I help you?" Now there's a chunk of language I taught students for years. The idea was that they?d be able to cope with shopping in English-speaking countries. Naturally, they were also taught a range of responses such as "No, thanks. I'm just looking." and "Yes. I'd like a pair of green wellies, size 44, please." And so on.

I mention this because while shopping yesterday in Dublin, I was confronted with the obsolescence of my teaching ways. Fact is: no on in an Irish shop says "May I help you?" anymore. You are much more likely to hear "Are you all right?" or more commonly, "Are you OK?" This latter was posed to me by a young woman in Brown Thomas store on Grafton Street. Because BT, as many call it, is regarded to be the Irish equivalent of Harrods or Saks, it was this "Are you OK?" that made me think about what is happening in the Irish services sector.

And what's happened is that the incredible growth of the past five years has encouraged retailers to find warm bodies and put them on the front lines while providing them with little or no training. It's a "strategy" that devalues staff and customers, and shows how little commitment there is to the future. When the history of the Irish boom of the 90's is written , a chapter will have to be devoted to the role cheap labour played in the process.

Talking of services, long before the boom began and many years before Dublin's Temple Bar area became a fashionable pubbing and clubbing place, Claddagh Records was trading at 2 Cecelia Street. The shop continues to represent all that's good in music and knowledgeable, polite service. Purchases included "Specialists In All Styles" by Orchestra Baobab and "The Fine Art of Piping" by Liam O'Flynn. Keeping the Christmas-rush customers satisfied was the charming and talented Martin Nolan. His latest album is called "Bright Silver, Dark Cloud" and it has joined the collection.

Moving on shortly from Dublin to Limerick. Many thanks to the Donnelly Family of Haddon Road for their overwhelming generosity and blogging support. Last night's fun concluded with a bottle of Saint-Emilion (1998), one of Chateau Landat (1998), a fine mix of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petit Verdot, and finally a splendid 1996 Chateau Barthez, which represents the very best of Haut-Medoc.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 21 December 2002 at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Celtic Tiger is tired. All the effort required to keep bounding ahead of its European playmates has taken its toll. Not surprising then that Ireland?s Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has issued a gloomy forecast for 2003. Rising unemployment, slowing growth and soaring inflation are on the agenda. The inflation figures are scary. In the housing sector, it?s 13 per cent, says the ESRI.

Meanwhile, life goes on. The Yacht pub in Clontarf was buzzing at midnight last night and strong drink was being consumed at a terrific rate. Either everyone had read the ESRI report or no one had. Astonishing, too, for the visitor was the way in which mobile phones have become part of personal fashion and public discourse. We were sitting opposite a young couple who impressively wove drinking, smoking, texting, talking and calling into a seamless performance. There?s no need to visit Finland anymore to see how this new form of interpersonal communication is evolving.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 20 December 2002 at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting to a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, 'new faces.' He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. 'New faces,' he said finally, 'don?t tell me about new faces.' It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised 'new faces,' there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story."

An excerpt there from Goodbye To All That, a bittersweet reflection on Manhattan by Joan Didion. Anyone who's lived in the city will instantly understand the emotions, the scenes Didion depicts so movingly. The multitudinous facets of Christmas, that season of hope but also that season of unbearable loneliness for so many of New York's internal exiles, are captured memorably here in Didion's painfully accurate prose:

"You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May. For that reason I was most comfortable with the company of Southerners. They seemed to be in New York as I was, on some indefinitely extended leave from wherever they belonged, disciplined to consider the future, temporary exiles who always knew when the flights left for New Orleans or Memphis or Richmond or, in my case, California. Someone who lives with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar. Christmas, for example, was a difficult season. Other people could take it in stride, going to Stowe or going abroad or going for the day to their mothers? places in Connecticut; those of us who believed that we lived somewhere else would spend it making and canceling airline reservations, waiting for weatherbound flights as if for the last plane out of Lisbon in 1940, and finally comforting one another, those of us who were left, with oranges and mementos and smoked-oyster stuffings of childhood, gathering close, colonials in a far country."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 19 December 2002 at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Horrible murders took place long before the Internet became part of First World life. Whether in fact (Jack the Ripper) or in fiction (Hannibal Lecter), killers have been disembowelling, dismembering and disposing of their victims with fiendish energy and, sometimes, ingenuity for many's the day. That's the way it is with monsters. They'll use letters, postcards, telegrams, cars and whatever other technology is at hand to snare the unwary.

Add an Internet angle to the equation, however, and jaded editors hit the public panic buttons for there's a lot to be gained by playing on ignorance and insecurity. And so it was last week when it was reported that a German cannibal had used the Net to find his victim(s). The mass-market German daily Bild reported that a computer engineer from Berlin had responded to an online advertisement that said: "Seeking young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 to slaughter." With the lurid style that it is famous for, Bild went into detail about how the victim, in his 40s, had had his penis chopped off, and how both the alleged killer and victim dined on the organ before the host cut his guest into pieces in the central German town of Rotenburg, near Kassel. The 41-year-old murderer videotaped the deed, prosecutors said.

The serious news weekly Der Spiegel took up the story in this week's edition "Verbrechen: Der Kannibale von Rotenburg", and, in the thorough style that its readers have become accustomed to, it profiled the two principals, provided background information on perversions as diverse as Newsgroups and Snuff movies, and listed some of the more disgusting aspects of the Web usage. What it also presented was the e-mail address of the victim, darmopfer@gmx.de, which may or may not have added value to the story, but it was surely not in the best of taste to follow the article with a two-page ad spread for that very same e-mail service: GMX.de.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 18 December 2002 at 7:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Sunday, 3 November, an unmanned American Predator reconnaissance aircraft fired a missile at a car in Yemen that was believed to be carrying Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, an Al Qaeda leader. Al-Harethi and his five companions in the vehicle were killed.

The incident kicks off "Manhunt", a thought-provoking article by Seymour Hersh in the current issue of the New Yorker. The subtitle of Hersh's piece is "The Bush Administration's new strategy in the war against terrorism". And what a dramatic new strategy it is, for it means the return of selective killing as part of United States foreign policy. As Hersh points out, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order in 1976 banning political assassination, and that order remains in force, but in the aftermath of 11 September the Bush Administration has come to regard the targeting and killing of individual Al Qaeda members without juridical process as justifiable military action. This is a new kind of war, says Washington, involving international terrorist organizations and unstable states. According to Hersh, Defense Department lawyers have concluded that the killing of selected individuals would not be illegal under the Army's Law of War if the targets were "combatant forces of another nation, a guerrilla force, or a terrorist or other organization whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States."

Those who've read Hersh know that there's more to his stories than warmed-up history and, sure enough, it doesn't take long before the money graf arrives:

"Nonetheless, many past and present military and intelligence officials have expressed alarm at the Pentagon policy about targeting Al Qaeda members. Their concerns have less to do with the legality of the program than with its wisdom, its ethics, and, ultimately, its efficacy. Some of the most heated criticism comes from within the Special Forces."

Tensions within the Bush administration, unease among the military, international queasiness, the problems of controlling "killer teams" and the dangers of backlash are all parts of the complicated picture Hersh paints. He makes the most of the dynamic and when the article needs a glint of steel, he calls on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who doesn't disappoint:

"In recent months, some of Rumsfeld's most trusted aides have staged private meetings with past and present military and intelligence officials to discuss the expanding war on terrorism. 'There are five hundred guys out there you have to kill,' a former C.I.A. official said. 'There's no way to sugarcoat it ? you just have to kill them. And you can't always be one hundred per cent sure of the intelligence. Sometimes you have to settle for ninety-five per cent.'"

As Portia says in The Merchant of Venice: "If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 17 December 2002 at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"A Christmas Childhood" by Patrick Kavanagh captures perfectly the Advent experience in a country that was once rural Ireland.

My father played the melodion Outside at our gate; There were stars in the morning east; And they danced to his music. Across the wild bogs his melodion called To Lennons and Callans. As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry I knew some strange thing had happened. Outside in the cow-house my mother Made the music of milking; The light of her stable-lamp was a star And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle. A water-hen screeched in the bog, Mass-going feet Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes, Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel. My child poet picked out the letters On the grey stone, In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland, The winking glitter of a frosty dawn. Cassiopeia was over Cassidy's hanging hill, I looked and three whin bushes rode across The horizon — the Three Wise Kings. An old man passing said: "Can't he make it talk" — The melodion, I hid in the doorway And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat. I nicked six nicks on the door-post With my penknife's big blade — There was a little one for cutting tobacco. And I was six Christmases of age. My father played the melodion, My mother milked the cows, And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned On the Virgin Mary's blouse.

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 16 December 2002 at 7:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nightown peaked in the sophisticated dark-panelled, low-lit surroundings of The Roosevelt Bar, which is conveniently located next to the Lehel U-Bahn station (Lines 4 and 5) and the Lehel tram stop (Line 17). It's open Saturdays until 3 am, by the way.

Three sides of the evening's sparkling conversational rectangle were provided by Ann, Talitha and Jill, who concentrated on the full-bodied reds and whites of Coldwater Creek. With the bar being named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that great US president who helped end Prohibition and fascism, I decided to concentrate on whisky sours, of which Michael Jackson in his splendid World Guide To Whisky says:

"When the rest of the country was grappling with Prohibition, cosmopolitan New York contrived to develop a taste for Scotch and Canadian whiskies, and both have endured. The enthusiasm for Canadian whiskies has been fostered, too, by their tantalising proximity: they are within easy reach, and not excessively priced, yet they have the cachet of the import. In those days of Prohibition, it was the East that disguised whiskies in cocktails like the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned and the Sour."

Fancy a whisky sour? Here's how to make one:

INGREDIENTS: 60 ml. Bourbon or Rye whisky 20 ml. lemon juice 1 teaspoon castor sugar 1 teaspoon egg white (optional) PREPARATION: Shake with ice, then strain into a chilled highball glass. Place lemon slice on the rim and serve immediately.

And here's a timeless FDR quote to enjoy with the cocktail: "A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 15 December 2002 at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Perhaps less flavourful than Chardonnay and not quite as aromatic as Pinot Gris, the Pinot Blanc variety nevertheless produces attractive dry white wines. Known as Pinot Bianco in Italy, it's called Weissburgunder in Austria and Germany. However, it is in the beautiful vineyards on the slopes of Vosges Mountains in the Alsace region that this grape really excels.

Our Gustave Lorentz Pinot Blanc Altenberg de Bergheim 1998 had the colour of pale straw and offered a delicate white-fruit bouquet with a hint of hay. Deliciously supple in the mouth, it delivered juicy fruit and mineral flavours on a steely acidic structure. Easy to drink and versatile, this is a natural partner for roast pork and sauerkraut. Great value at €7.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 14 December 2002 at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nick Denton, former Financial Times journalist, co-founder of the First Tuesday networking group and founder of Moreover.com , is a Brit with a nose for technology topics and trends, so the news that he's putting together a series of weblog media businesses means that bloggers everywhere should take heed. After all, deals could be done with this man. So, with a modicum of self interest in mind, Rainy Day is pleased to nominate nickdenton.org as its Blog of the week.

Denton's paid his dues. He left the security of the FT ship to try his hand at entrepreneurism is England, a bold move, and he then headed to Silicon Valley when the building out of Moreover.com needed tending to. After parting company with Moreover, he moved to New York, his new home and the base now for his nanopublishing venture, the first fruits of which are Gizmodo and Gawker. Denton says that the two sites cover categories too small to warrant dedicated print publications, but he believes that they'll have an appeal to advertisers sufficient to support a skeleton editorial operation.

Gizmodo, which launched in August, is a blog for the gadget addict. Designed by Mena Trott and edited by Pete Rojas, it profiles half a dozen new items each day, ranging from the tiniest cameras to the lightest laptops. Daft electronic toys feature as well. According to Denton, Gizmodo is already one of the leading destinations for hardcore gadget lovers. The weblog earns commission on its readers' purchases from Amazon.com, and plans to introduce advertising.

Gawker is a blog for Manhattan that will start in January. The target audience is the Big Apple's media and financial elite and the business model is advertising support, mainly from real estate brokers and luxury goods retailers. Jason Kottke is the designer and the site will be edited by Elizabeth Spiers.

Gawker will be followed by Blogwire (working title), which will "mine the editorial selections and commentary on weblogs to produce an improved personalized news service to consumers." The stories which have generated the most buzz in the blogging community will be identified and readers will be able to track the writings of their favourite bloggers. Meg Hourihan and Cameron Marlow will be contributing to the project. Denton knows a lot about news filtering systems so we can expect something impressive.

As has been pointed our a million times already, the Web is still groping for the form of expression that best fits its characteristics. The dominant content models of the moment mirror magazines and newspapers, but this is nothing more than forcing a new medium to conform to existing formats. What the Web is best at is connecting and interacting and this is the strength of the blog. With blogging, we're witnessing the emergence of a first generation tool with enormous potential and credit is due to Nick Denton for having the courage to keep the blog rolling.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 13 December 2002 at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The "winds of change" that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had forecast would blow through the African remnants of the British Empire where also being felt at home by the winter of 1963. Post-war lethargy had given way to Sixties Swing and a new generation was loudly asserting its identity. The killing of the dashing young American president on 22 November shocked the residents of Greater Manchester, many of them of Irish Catholic extraction whose modest red-brick homes were adorned with JFK pictures, but the events in Dallas were so grotesque as to be almost unreal and, besides, they had plenty worries of their own. There was the constant battle to make ends meet and then, on the following day, 23 November 1963, John Kilbride from Ashton-under-Lyne, aged twelve years, disappeared and was never seen alive again. A year later, his decomposed body was recovered from the bleak, deserted moorland in the hills above East Manchester. He had been brutally murdered.

The death last month of the so-called "Moors Murderer", Myra Hindley, compelled me to reopen Beyond Belief by Emlyn Williams and read once again about the killing spree that Hindley and her lover Ian Brady engaged in 40 years ago. Their victims were 16-year old Pauline Reade, 12-year old John Kilbride, 13-year old Keith Bennett, 10-year old Lesley Ann Downey and 17-year old Edward Evans.

Along with the innocence of the victims, what made the joint crimes of Hindley and Brady so shocking was the casualness with which they took life and the role played by the accoutrements of upward mobility in the murdering. They wouldn't have been able to entrap their victims or dispose of their bodies without a car, a relative luxury for a stock control clerk and a shorthand typist in those days. That Hindley was the driver on each occasion turned out to be fatal for her later clemency appeals. And then there was the camera and the tape recorder.

Today, we take gadgets for granted but 40 years ago there was less disposable income. Still, Hindley and Brady bought a camera and a tape recorder and that they were enthusiastic technicians was proved when those in the courtroom at their 1966 trial in Chester were presented with both the audio and visual result of a session during which 10-year old Lesley Ann Downey was forced to pose undressed, while Brady photographed her and made a recording of her hysterical pleas for mercy. It was, the judge said, "beyond belief".

What Truman Capote did for American "crime" writing in 1965 with In Cold Blood, Emlyn Williams did for the British variant with Beyond Belief in 1967. Capote's brilliant "A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences" was matched in style and substance by Williams's "A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection". And this makes it all the more lamentable that Beyond Belief is no longer in print for it is an unforgettable book. Here is Williams recreating the callous scene in the couple's kitchen shortly after Brady has smashed the head of 17-year old Edward Evans in the front room with an axe:

"The girl — who was wearing a skirt with black nylons — sat in her grandmother's chair, holding cup and saucer and with her tartaned-slippered feet on the mantelpiece. Which was only just low enough for them to reach. There was blood on the tartan slippers. Stirring her tea in this pose, she said 'Ian, d'ye remember the time we went on the moors with a body in the back, and you were off burying it, and a police car stopped, and a copper came up to the car and leant over, an' said 'What's the trouble?' an' I said 'I'm waitin' to dry me sparkin' plugs' an' I was prayin' Ian wouldn't appear, then the feller drove off, dy'e want another cup, now what about tomorrow?' "

Beyond belief, indeed.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 12 December 2002 at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Was I the only blogger not attending Supernova 2002, which ended yesterday in Palo Alto? Exploring the distributed future was the theme of the conference. Intelligence is moving to the edges, say the organizers.

Three cheers for Kevin Werbach, editor of Esther Dyson's legendary Release 1.0, and the driving force behind Supernova. Look at the list of speakers he lined up: Google co-founder Sergey Brin, pundit Clay Shirky, visionary Howard Rheingold. The agenda featured everything from the critical challenges of collaborative business to the promise and peril of Web services and the conflicts over digital media. Lots of the technologies being talked about — WiFi wireless LANs, streaming video, Weblogs — were employed during the discussions.

Speaking of Weblogs, for all those unable to attend the conference the Supernova Gloup Blog, running on Moveable Type, provided live coverage of the event. This blog is now the "official" report on Supernova. Here's an excerpt:

"Howard Rheingold starts by observing how kids pass notes via SMS on mobile phones... How will the world look with 1000 times more mobile phones, each with 1000 times more bandwidth and 1000 times more storage and 1000 times more processing and display power?

?The power of collective action should breed new types of behavior. Self governance. Distributed problem solving. Reputation checking to meet strangers. New market (buyer/seller) behaviors. Just in time and along the way job search?

?A 15-20 year old cohort around the world is the first texting generation. They share a zeitgeist. Values about being constantly connected. Some audience questions about the dangers of mob rule..."

The bottom line from the organizers: "As bad as the market outlook may be, can you afford not to have a strategy? Somewhere between yesterday's irrational exuberance and today's reactionary pessimism lies tomorrow's strategic wisdom."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 11 December 2002 at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lucky Londoners can stroll along to the Union Chapel tonight to hear singer-songwriter and Nashville resident Beth Nielsen Chapman. She's written songs for the likes of Faith Hill but hardly gets any airplay herself as most of the 2,000 country music stations in the US shy away from any kind of music that's challenging, and concentrate instead on filling the ether with bland, boring, lethal schmaltz.

The Chapman gig is just part of a London series organized by the Barbican Centre called "Further Beyond Nashville" which aims to show that there's more to country than the tepid Garth Brooks or the toxic Toby Keith. The latter famous for the summer hit "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)", which declared: "You'll be sorry that you messed with/The US of A/'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass/It's the American way."

No, Beth Nielsen Chapman belongs to what some now call "alternative country". Fellow travellers include singers Lyle Lovett and Laura Cantrell, and bands Lambchop, memorably once described as producing "orchestral country-soul", and the tremendously exciting Calexico, appearing in London with a Mexican mariachi band. And all these artists, by the way, are part of the Barbican programme that ends tomorrow.

Away from the commercially defined Nashville sound, there exists another music, a traditional American mode of expression that the likes of Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle have given dignified voice to over the years. The seven million copies that the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? sold shows that hillbilly, bluegrass music has an audience.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 10 December 2002 at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"I am from Constantinople by descent, but I was born in Alexandria — at a house on Seriph Street; I left very young, and spent much of my childhood in England. Subsequently I visited this country as an adult, but for a short period of time. I have also lived in France. During my adolescence I lived over two years in Constantinople. It has been many years since I last visited Greece.

My last employment was as a clerk at a government office under the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt. I know English, French, and a little Italian."

So wrote C. P. Cavafy in 1910. I've been reading his poems while waiting for my dreadful cold to retreat. Here's one of his most unsettling ones:

The City

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is — like a corpse — buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted."

New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land — do not hope —
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.

Cavafy was born on 29 April 1863 and died on the same date in 1933 in Alexandria.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 9 December 2002 at 7:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hand me that bauble because it's blog-of-the-week time again. The lucky recipient of gong No. VIII is Salon blogs. Resounding applause. And deservedly, too.

What can one say about Salon? It has fought the good content fight, and although the parched New Economy landscape is littered with the bones of those who didn't make it, Salon continues to tramp along, determined to get to where the pastures are green. Despite regular doom-laden articles in journals such as Business Week and Forbes, the San Francisco-based site now has 45,000 people who value a voice that's unique and independent to the extent that they pay for Salon Premium.

The online zine celebrated its seventh birthday recently, and editor David Talbot used the occasion to hit back at those who have been predicting Salon's demise for years:

"More overeager obituaries are certain to follow. But perversely, Salon still has a pulse," he wrote in a letter to readers. Salon, he said, "has established the fundamentals of a solid business — including over 3.4 million monthly readers and more than 500 advertisers". Profitability will follow, he insists. Really?

Talbot's letter was followed a day later by the company's quarterly results and these must have sobered up its most ardent supporters. The company's $1.5 million fiscal second-quarter net loss was greater than its $1 million in revenue, despite strong growth in subscriptions and advertising revenue. And in its SEC filing, Salon issued a "going concern" notice, which is a warning to investors that unless it gets more money it might go out of business.

Still, whenever the bailiffs approach the door, Salon always finds some way of repelling them. Maybe Salon blogs can help out here. Under the guidance of the outstanding Scott Rosenberg, the zine's managing editor, Salon blogs offers an alternative home to those who might otherwise find refuge at Blogger any of the other blog-hosting addresses. The advantage is guaranteed traffic, and of the finest kind as well. Who wouldn't want intelligent, savvy, affluent readers? Salon Blogs are powered by Radio UserLand, which lets bloggers post new items from a browser with one click. The tool automatically builds the site and organizes and archives posts. The software and service are free for a 30-day trial, then costs $39.95, which includes one year of software updates and site hosting.

So, whither Salon blogs? Another year will tell a lot. Those who say blogging's a fad may see their cynicism confirmed; those who believe we're seeing the emergence of a disruptive force that will affect everything from journalism to platforms might ending up being rewarded for their vision. Salon, has placed a small but significant bet.

Any my favourite Salon blog? It has to be "The Reverse Cowgirl's Blog" (wherein a writer attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection). She's devastating on Lisa Guernsey, who had an article in the New York Times on 28 November titled, "Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (or Is It?)". It was too much for the The Reverse Cowgirl:

"my word, isn't Gloria Steinem dead yet? good lord, in 2002, can't at least cyberspace be free of the old crybabying of feminist wanna-be victims who spend too much time and too much ink bleating and pointing at one more forum in which they've decided that bad men are keeping good women down?

one of the nicest things about the blogosphere is that it still operates solely under survival of the fittest principles. if your blog sucks, no one will visit it; if your blog does not suck, people will read it. of course, if you only update your blog once every other menstrual cycle, like Guernsey, you can always just blame men for its lack of popularity."

We should be grateful that Salon has provided such a refreshing voice with a pulpit.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 8 December 2002 at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This blog is always on the lookout for stories concerning precipitation, condensation and the like. It's not called Rainy Day for nothing, you know. That said, to business. Item No. 1 comes from Claire Tomalin's biography of Samuel Pepys. She observes that John Evelyn made a special note in his diary of August 1653 that he was going to experiment with an "annual hair wash." Bears thinking about, that.

Item No. 2: Just found a UPI story called "Water found at Martian south pole":

"Scientists reported Thursday they have discovered frozen water near the south pole of Mars, a finding that will help to create more accurate computer models of Martian climate and could be useful when human space missions reach the planet."

What was your reaction upon reading this? Excitement? Disinterest? Considering that today marks the 30th anniversary of the launching of the
Apollo 17 mission, which led to the last human footsteps on the Moon, I think the time has come to renew space exploration efforts. How about setting a goal for a manned mission to Mars?

Nick Mallory feels passionately about this as his posting on on Rand Simberg's Transterrestrial Musings shows:

"The ISS has been a disaster, Columbus didn't spend ten years pottering around the bay to test his systems, who can name two people who've been up there? Who even knows that it's up there at all??

What will the 20th century be remembered for? Two world wars, nuclear weapons and Neil Armstrong. What's the 21st going to be remembered for? Reality TV? We've e mail and cell phones and we've nothing to say. Lets do Mars Direct, let's say boys you've a five percent chance of not coming back but a 100% chance of becoming heroes. People would queue up from New York to Florida. The safer we are the more scared of the slightest risk we become."

Mars Direct. I like the sound of it.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 7 December 2002 at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Laid low with a rather nasty virus at the moment, I am. It's packing the full 'flu works: fever, pains, sweating fits?

In my lucid moments, I turn to Claire Tomalin's marvellous new " Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self". This is my book of the year and will give pleasure for a long time to come. Speaking of pleasure, Sam was a bit of a lad. Here he's being a jolly neighbour to Mrs Betty Mitchell by giving her a lift home in his coach. But his devious game plan was to get her hand under his coat "and did tocar mi cosa con su mano [touch my thing with her hand] through my chemise, but yet so as to hazer me hazer la grande cosa [make me make the great thing, i.e. orgasm]."

Although Pepys's ribald candour does shock her at times, Tomalin is admiring of the man. "More than once he says in the course of the Diary that it is right to enjoy the world while you can, because there will be times when you will not be able to." Like when the 'flu is raging through your body.

A diarist of genius has met a masterly biographer and the result is the best work on Pepys since Robert Louis Stevenson's magnificent essay of 1881. By the way, bloggers might note the following very astute aside from Tomalin's Prologue:

"The politician Tony Benn has said that he writes his diary in order to experience everything three times, once as lived, once in the writing down, once in the later reading of what he has written. It is a good explanation, and there is a further reason, which is to offer yourself to posterity."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 6 December 2002 at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Hiler's Cityblog New York is online. Impressive. Tasty morsels on cinema, readings and talks, and all done with style. So, does this mean that the listings makers over at Time Out, the Village Voice, New York Magazine and The New Yorker are having sleepless nights? Well, maybe not those giants, but Instapundit thinks that this kind of blog puts alternative weeklies in danger of extinction:

"...one of the main reasons people pick up free alt-weeklies is for the entertainment listings and quirky local coverage -- and that's something that blogs can do better than once-a-week publications with print-level overhead. So I think that Alt-weeklies will have to either join the blogging revolution, or go out of business. I suspect that ventures like Hiler's will do better than most web ventures at attracting advertising, too, for obvious reasons."

Not everyone agrees, though, that ink-and-paper should be worried by the Hiler move. Jeff Jarvis answers with "CitySearch":

"I've spent eight years working in local online and that whole time, people acted as if CitySearch were a killer ap. Well, killer is right. It killed capital. There's no question that entertainment listings are useful. Only problem is, you use them only when you use them. If you're not going to a movie tonight, you don't need the movie listings (or theater listings or poetry listings or whatever)."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 5 December 2002 at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

esurient (adjective), from the Latin esurire, meaning to be hungry

Customer: "Good Morning.
Owner: Good morning, Sir. Welcome to the National cheese Emporium!
Customer: Ah, thank you, my good man.
Owner: What can I do for you, Sir?
Customer: Well, I was, uh, sitting in the public library on Thurmon Street just now, skimming through 'Rogue Herrys' by Hugh Walpole, and I suddenly came over all peckish.
Owner: Peckish, sir?
Customer: Esurient.
Owner: Eh?
Customer: 'Ee, Ah wor 'ungry-loike!
Owner: Ah, hungry!
Customer: In a nutshell. And I thought to myself, 'a little fermented curd will do the trick,' so, I curtailed my Walpoling activites, sallied forth, and infiltrated your place of purveyance to negotiate the vending of some cheesy comestibles!"

The Cheese Shop Sketch from "The Instant Monty Python Record Collection"

And speaking of cheese, The Cheese Museum by Italo Calvino is a marvellous short story, beautifully translated from the Italian by William Weaver:

"Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries. This shop is a museum: Mr. Palomar, visiting it, feels as he does in the Louvre, behind every displayed object the presence of the civilization that has given it form and takes form from it

This shop is a dictionary; the language is the system of cheeses as a whole: a language whose morphology records declensions and conjugations in countless variants, and whose lexicon presents an inexhaustible richness of synonyms, idiomatic usages, connotations, and nuances of meaning, as in all languages nourished by the contribution of a hundred dialects..."

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 4 December 2002 at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the golden, olden days of rock and roll, a band's tour would be considered incomplete without a certain amount of laying waste to bars and hotels rooms. Such exuberance was regarded as part of a group's authenticity. But as rock and roll moved from the margins to the middle of the road and as pop music morphed into commerce, that kind of conduct came to be seen as bad for business. Stars became less incandescent and more establishment; rock's rebels were defanged.

In the early hours of Sunday morning in Munich, however, the British group Oasis helped generate the kind of news stories not seen since the wildest days of the Stones and the Who: mad drinking, huge battle with the police, frontman losing two front teeth, injuries, arrests, concerts cancelled? And what made the episode all the more delicious was that the battle took place in the ridiculously pompous and horrendously expensive Bayerischer Hof hotel.

"Oasis in nightclub attack", is how the band portrays the incident:

"Several members of Oasis and their entourage were the victims of an unprovoked attack by a group of youths in a Munich club last night, where they were during their European tour. Liam Gallagher sustained facial injuries, including several broken teeth, while two of the group's security guards were forced to seek hospital treatment, one after being knocked unconscious. The attackers left the scene before police arrived."

The BBC is more direct with its "Oasis singer 'kicked policeman'" headline:

"German police have said Oasis singer Liam Gallagher kicked an officer in the chest 'with full force' during a fight in a Munich hotel. But the star will probably not face further charges after paying 100,000 euros (?64,000) and being released, police have said.

Can't see this harming ticket sales when the lads get back on tour. Can you?

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 3 December 2002 at 6:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Munich in December: year fading, leaden skies, chilly dampness... Time for some "Bavarian" music. No, not the Oktoberfest sort, more the kind favoured by Manfred Eicher, the Munich producer whose ECM, or Edition of Contemporary Music, label has proved that there's a global audience for contemporary classical music. Eicher made his name in the early seventies recording Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea and other progressive jazz stars. Then, in 1978, he released Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich and a new vista opened.

Although the music of Arvo P䲴 has appeared on more than two hundred CDs, there's almost universal agreement that the Estonian composer's best work has been captured on the ten recordings in ECM's P䲴 series.

It was the great Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer who did most to introduce Arvo P䲴's music to the West and he features on ECM's first P䲴 album, Tabula Rasa, which appeared in 1984. In many ways, it's his most imposing recording. "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" pays homage to the great modern English composer who influenced P䲴's music so much, while "Fratres" is mesmerizingly simple with Kremer giving of his best. "Tabula Rasa", the title track, is filled with transcendental bell ringing created by chamber orchestra, two solo violins and a piano "prepared" in the John Cage style.

After Tabula Rasa came Arbos (1988), which ends with "Stabat Mater", a major sacred statement. The build up comprises six smaller works, including the exquisitely sad "Pari Intervallo". In 1989, The Passion According to Saint John was released and ensuing ECM releases continued the religious theme employing the by now familiar format of plaintive string elegies alternating with devotional vocals: Miserere (1991), Te Deum (1993), and Litany (1996). Only serious P䲴 addicts, however, can be expected to hand over money for his Kanon Pokajanen (1998), a hugely forbidding setting of the Russian Orthodox canon of repentance.

Munich in December: chilly dampness, leaden skies, year fading?score by Arvo P䲴.

Thanks to colleague Birgit Roberts for an extended loan of Tabula Rasa and Arbos, and thanks, too, to David Pinkerton, whose Arvo P䲴 Information Archive is devoted to the analysis and appreciation of the music of the Estonian composer.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 2 December 2002 at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The official story is that the Israelis sent a letter, in English, to the German Embassy in Tel Aviv, which faxed it to Army HQ in Germany, which in turn refaxed it to the government in Berlin. By the time Defence Minister Peter Struck got it, however, the request for armoured personnel carriers had become so fuzzy and so difficult to decipher that he advised Chancellor Gerhard Schr? to announce Wednesday that Germany would agree to the request for Fuchs NBC (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical) detection tanks.

Ooops! Mega embarrassment! What Israel actually asked for, though, was the standard version of the Fuchs tank, capable of carrying 10 soldiers and ideal for the kind of military operations that it has been carrying out in the West Bank, not the version with weapon-sniffing gizmos.

Chalk up another foreign policy black eye for a chancellor whose erratic performance on the world stage has been puzzling leaders in Washington, London, Paris, Madrid and Rome since he opted for a populist anti-war policy in the run-up to his re-election in September.

The fuzzy fax story is seen by many as a nothing more than a clumsy attempt at covering for the incompetence of a government that's seriously adrift on domestic and international affairs. It's widely assumed that Schr? will reject the Israeli request on the grounds that delivering this version of the Fuchs would violate a German law prohibiting the sale of weapons to countries involved in conflicts. But not everyone in his SPD party sees it like that. In an interview with today's Welt am Sonntag newspaper, Reinhold Robbe, chairman of the parliamentary defence committee, says he favours delivery of the armoured personnel carriers: "Israel has a special need of protection that's very real, not theoretical. Given our historical responsibility, we should stand by Israel and deliver the Fuchs transporter." But the SPD's coalition partners, the Greens, don't see it like that. Hans-Christian Str?e, the party's vice chairman, has already stated that his party would refuse the transporter request.

According to the yesterday's edition of the popular Bild newspaper, German and Israeli officials will meet Monday in Berlin to discuss the Israeli request for arms. In case of an Iraqi attack, an appeal for Patriot missile interceptor systems is said to be on the agenda, and, stubbornly, the Fuchs transporter requirement is reported to be there as well.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 1 December 2002 at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)