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Saturday, November 06, 2004

One of the benefits of being up at 6:30am because you’ve had a cat walking across your head is that you get to see a sunrise like this. And then go back to bed.

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Nissan advertising they shouldn’t try in Ireland

Saturday, November 06, 2004

You know Nissan have this ‘Shift’ them in their current ads? Like, ‘Shift Expectations’, that sort of thing.

They got a bit carried away in a TV ad that’s running here at the moment. It’s particularly unfortunate, because ‘to shift’ means something entirely different in Ireland, which I can’t help thinking about, especially when the voiceover earnestly says:

‘Everything we touch, we shift. Everything we shift we try to make better.’

Posted by David in • Life

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Four more years

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

So with John Kerry conceding the election to Bush this morning, we’re looking at four more years of this president – not a pleasant thought.

The most frightening thing about the result are the reasons people gave for their decision. According to the AP exit polling, if you thought Iraq was the most important issue, you were very likely to vote for Kerry. Similarly, if the economy mattered most, you voted for the Democrats. However, the single most important issue in the minds of the electorate (and one that escaped the advanced polling) were moral values, which drew a massive Christian vote to counteract the increased voting from young people.

Loosely translated ‘moral values’ means are you Christian, and are you opposed to gay marriage and abortion? And 80% of the voters who said that moral values were important to them voted for Bush.

Which suggests to me that for a very large number of people in this country, the performance of a president is irrelevant so long as he or she shares your personal beliefs.

So the careful separation of church and state, and the respect and tolerance of people of all religions and none called for in the constitution are thrown over, and the Republicans become the party of the evangelicals.

Note that the issue was ‘moral values’ not morality. Assessing morality requires discernment and judgement (and you might conclude that the president is pretty suspect morally). But assessing ‘moral values’ just means establishing that the president adheres to the same unthinking prescriptive codes that you do. Easy.

And with there being almost no change in the elctoral map from last time (we’ll have to wait and see with New Mexico), the country is becoming increasingly entrenched. It reminds me a little of how things felt when Mrs Thatcher won re-election in the UK in the mid-80s – those opposed to her couldn’t understand how she could be returned to office, while she happily continued her ideologically-led destruction of many of the best parts of British society.

But her ideology was at least a political one – rampant free-marketeerism and the running down of public services. Bush’s ideology is based on religious beliefs, unemcumbered by thoughts of tolerance and pluralism. This isn’t just a shift to the right, it’s a shift away from the basis of politcal life in the US to this point – it’s always been a religious country, but it’s been governed by largely secular parties. Now that’s not the case. It is not nor it cannot come to good.

Posted by David in • Life

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If you’re given lemons

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

It’s going to be a bit quiet round here for the next week or so – I’m working hard building a new site for myself.

The site is to support my new venture – web consultant. Tired of applying for jobs and not hearing anything (or, more accurately, hearing that there’s been no decision yet), I decided to formalise what’s been happening informally already.

I’m doing some web content writing for my old friends at iQ Content, and some other web projects for people. So now I’m admitting that that’s what’s happening, and I’m going after some other business.

When I’ve built my own site.

Posted by David in • Life

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Balloon fiesta

Sunday, October 10, 2004

The balloon fiesta in Albuquerque is an annual week-long treat for the locals, and the balloonists.

We went down on Saturday morning early, to see more balloons than I could image heading up into the blue blue sky.

Even for amateurish photographers like me, it was like shooting fish in a barrel – colourful shapes, sharp light from a low angle, clear skies. A great day out (except for the people in the balloon that ended up caught on the top of a 500’ radio mast).

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Posted by David in
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St Patrick’s Battalion

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Talking to Roque today, while getting one of his great carnitas in the plaza, and he is amazed I haven’t heard of Los San Patricios – the Irish who fought for Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.

Seems a bunch of Irish soldiers deserted from the US army amid widespread atrocities by the Americans and intolerance of Catholics among the officers. Many fell in with the Mexicans, and recognized an attack by a larger more powerful neighbour when they saw one.

The Irish formed St Patrick’s Battalion, and fought bravely against the Americans in several encounters. When the US army eventually won, many of them were hanged as deserters and traitors, with ‘D’ for deserter branded on their faces. Lovely.

Others survived and stayed in Mexico – Roque tells me the current president Vicente Fox is descended from one of the San Patricios, although my quick internet search didn’t confirm that.

The battalion is still honoured in Mexico – a stamp commemorating their efforts was recently produced.

The Latin feel of New Mexico puts me in mind of Ireland a lot, so I can see how there would have been an affinity between the Irish soldiers and the Mexicans, and it’s nice to find some more connections between there and this part of the world.

More information on the battalion:

Hispanic Magazine

Crisis Magazine – a more detailed historical account.

Posted by David in • Life

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Soft day, thank God

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

It started raining here last night around midnight. And stopped around 5pm.

And when I say rain, I mean hard thundery, tornado-warnings-in-force kind of rain. Some bouncy hail too.

New Mexico houses don’t have guttering, they have little ramps that launch the water off the almost-flat roof and send it crashing to the ground, to soak into the sand, or to form little rivulets that run downhill the best way they can.

Large buckets to collect this water (for redistribution to the dryer parts of the yard) were overflowing when we woke up, and full again after I’d emptied them at lunchtime.

Between the loud rain, the overcast day felt suitably Irish, but when the sun came out around 6:30pm and we went for a quick stroll, we saw there was snow on top of the mountains. You’d be waiting a long time for that in Dublin. And it’s only the first week in October.

Posted by David in • Life

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Sparx y Lorenzo Antonio

Thursday, September 30, 2004

Last Sunday I went to see the biggest selling New Mexican musical acts perform. One of the acts, Sparx, has sold over a million albums, and the other, Lorenzo Antonio (their chief songwriter and mentor, as well as a performer in his own right) isn’t far behind.

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4000 people came out on Sunday night to the amphitheatre at Sandia casino on the edge of Albuquerque. And yet half the people in the state have never heard of them.

Welcome to the world of New Mexico music. For anglos like me, it’s something of a closed community, but Buendia has been here long enough and is interested enough to go exploring. We were possibly the only completely anglo couple there (’anglo’ here is a catch all phrase meaning non-Spanish or Indian. There’s a joke about a kid up in Las Vegas, New Mexico coming home after his first day at school. ‘How was it?’ asks his mum. ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘I knew almost everyone in class. There’s only one anglo in the class, and he’s black.’)

First up was Lorenzo Antonio – a baby-faced cross between Ricky Martin and Daniel O’Donnell. The grannies love him (as do the gay guys ahead of us in the queue), and he’s got a great voice and gives 110% on everything. Some of the songs are Latin-tinged pop with good hooks, while others are covers of classic ballads. He sings mostly in Spanish, backed by a tight band.

He’s smiley and at ease, as befits someone who was a child performer. After a while, he takes a break, and his sisters hit the stage.

They’re the New Mexican Spice Girls, and are huge in Mexico, too. Dressed in skimpy 80s-inspired glittery clothes, their dance routines are slick and there’s enough difference between the sisters for everyone to have their favourite, from the pre-teen girls, through the red-blooded men to the grannies.

There’s the cute little one, the one with the best voice, the friendly outgoing one, and the sexy one (with the shortest skirt and crop top). Actually, they’re a lot better than the Spice Girls because they can all sing and they’re all pretty. The songs are pretty simple ditties, but they range from salsa syncopation, through rock and roll classics (in English) to power ballads. But it’s hard not to like them, and when ten mariachi musicians come on stage, the crowd goes wild.

We detour into classic Mexican and New Mexican songs – like B’Witched going trad in the middle of a show – and then Lorenzo Antonio rejoins them, this time in a smart black suit, to wring every drop of emotion from some full-on tearjerkers.

By the time the finale comes round, we’ve had the mariachis, eight little girls in huge Spanish dresses, a flamenco couple, a cowboy doing lasso tricks, juggling stilt walkers and jitterbugging duos all on stage.

It was a great night, and it’s good to see the Spanish side of local culture is still strong enough that it can fill a huge auditorium. There was nothing dry or curatorial about this – the old standards and the new songs were mixed side by side, and everyone (except me) was singing along in Spanish.

I’m beginning to see that the Spanish language part of life here is much more vibrant than the Irish language side of life in Ireland (as befits a place where Spanish has been spoken since 1610, and which only became a US state in the 1920s). From the fiestas to Sparx, it’s something that everyone born here (and those coming here withe some Spanish, like Buendia) can draw on.

More information on Lorenzo Antonio, and Sparx.

Posted by David in • Life

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Everyone is Here

Thursday, September 30, 2004

More Finn Brothers praise. The new album – ‘Everyone is Here’, is beautiful and positive and tender.

And that’s not just my opinion. Salon today has a three-page hymn of praise to the songwriting talents of Neil Finn – ‘Let your mood downshift in the dusk one evening and the next thing you know a line you’ve heard a hundred times floors you.’ Damn right.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and you’d be better listening to some of his songs than reading about them, but it’s a good article (you’ll probably need a free day pass or something to read it).

Posted by David in • Life

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Autumn TV preview – ‘Attack of the Clones’

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

And another thing, while I remember. I’ve just had my first article for the Santa Fe Reporter published. The Reporter is the alternative weekly magazine in town, and it’s read by around 50,000 people.

I did a preview of the new TV season, and it begins:

This season, cloning comes to television. The networks’ nerve has failed and instead of blazing new trails they give us copies of existing programs that weren’t great in the first place, or try two versions of the same suspect reality TV idea.

Several of the retreads build on the success of the tightly plotted but heartless ‘CSI’ franchise. CBS launches a new spin-off, ‘CSI New York’ (Wednesdays), with Gary Sinise lending some gravitas to the show. Proving that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, NBC also tries to cash in on our ghoulish tendencies with ‘Medical Investigation’ (Fridays).

These shows are competent but leave little room for character development, nuance or quirkiness, which is why they’re so easy to clone (the ‘Law and Order’ family follow a similar approach). The characters and settings are completely interchangeable: you just need one slightly aloof leader with a black sense of humour, one loyal female lieutenant, a couple of younger earnest helpers, two unrelated investigations each episode, one poorly-lit laboratory (where the requisite ‘science bit’ happens) and you’re done – in New York, Vegas or Miami.

In a little while I’ll post the full article in the relevant section on this site, but if you’re really keen to read the full thing, let me know and I’ll send you a copy.

Posted by David in • Life

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