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Post by cato on Aug 22, 2019 15:18:49 GMT
I think one area where conservatives and liberals agree is that our modern lifestyle is far too passive, shallow, distracted, and concerned with ephemera and novelty. I think pretty much everyone agrees with this. Everybody accepts that mobile phones, social media, etc. are taking a toll on our intellectual, cultural and spiritual health. And even before mobile phones and the internet, they were similar anxieties about television and other new media-- anxieties which I believe were entirely justified. (I am currently reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a dystopian novel about a future where all books are burnt). This seems to be why there is such a phenomenal interest in "mindfulness" right now. I think this is one possible "hook" where our contemporaries might be drawn to a more conservative outlook. Great read. I enjoyed it when I read it last year.
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Post by Séamus on Sept 18, 2019 12:01:51 GMT
Vale:Ric Ocasek of The Cars. DRIVE is a song that,due to circumstances,often goes through my head,particularly the two or three refrain lines. Dubliners mightn't understand the difficulty in a city like Perth of being a non-driver. Often one will be offered (mostly unsolicited) lifts welcome or not,usually welcome if skies are darkening. And it rarely fails to start me humming "you can't go o-on..." A memory of the original video when the number was still new, is my mother saying "how mental" on seeing a woman splashing paint over the back of her head haphazardly on the wall. I was surprised to hear that comment, being already desensitized at that stage.
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Music
Mar 24, 2020 23:43:46 GMT
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Post by cato on Mar 24, 2020 23:43:46 GMT
As I probably said before ( old age involves repeating things and forgetting to whom and when) music was a great solace during the great financial crash when the IMF came to town and Ireland went bust. Lyric FM provided a welcome break from the dispiriting litany of financial crookedness and economic treason.
As we face another crisis music will help keep us sane , hopeful and willing to lift the heavy burdens of responsibility and civic duty yet again. We are not all classical music buffs . I have a fondness for country music. Kenny Rodgers one of America's country greats died a few days ago. His duet with Dolly Parton Islands in the Stream was in the charts for ages. As I child I thought the song was called "Ireland's Industries that is what we are..... "listen and hear!
His song the Gambler offers a wise guide to life's struggles.
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Music
Apr 16, 2020 7:46:42 GMT
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Post by Séamus on Apr 16, 2020 7:46:42 GMT
vale: Bill Martin,composer-partner of Phil Coulter, who gave us Puppet On A String and Congratulations and Celebrations,and who passed away earlier this month @81. I wonder would he have been disappointed or relieved at this year's Eurovision cancellation?
I haven't heard the latest on corona-sick Marianne Faithfull,but 103 year old Vera Lynn has reportedly provided backing vocals for a new recording of her perennially popular We'll Meet Again as a fundraiser for British Health. Seeing that even their PM's ICU nurses were from New Zealand and Latin America,perhaps a campaign to seek local recruitment and education would be a good investment for them. As British Post is bringing out an issue of lines of poetry to honour Wordsworth's anniversary and as I'm currently chewing on an experimentally marketed hot cross bun that's merged with Australian lamington cake,it might be pertinent to mention an Australian bushranger poem called Streets of Forbes...is it intriguing I've only ever come across Irish artists that have put it to music?- Niamh Parsons opened her debut album with a country-style rendition of it. As for the lamington cake itself,it was said to have been invented by the French chef of Lord and Lady Lamington, colonial governor of Queensland,who had only three ingredients at hand for an afternoon tea he wasn't expecting....brings to mind the passage from To The Lighthouse: "of course it was French....a whole French family could live on what an English cook throws away" "And they dragged him through the streets of Forbes to show the prize they had"
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Music
May 4, 2020 11:57:42 GMT
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Post by Séamus on May 4, 2020 11:57:42 GMT
Unlike Bono,I didn't first hear the Harry's Games song on the car radio after a crash and then assume I'd been killed and was now listening to disembodied spirits. But I can remember hearing it for the first time; a sister rushing over with a cassette,waking a sleeping-in brother and excitedly asking him to listen to 'Clannad's latest'. Despite the use of a synthesizer and my older siblings being generally reactionaries against synthesizer music,there was outstanding approval. The cassette may have even been a tape of a tape or record. This week I came across Celtic Dream, apparently written for the group's farewell tour,that they've largely had to wave farewell to (although I notice the American dates are not finally cancelled yet) and was able to hear and watch (lovely Donegal scenery) the single at the press of a button. Although Clannad have been through different phases of music since,watching Moya on the harp,her brother on the whistle,it kept occuring to me how things can ride the wave of change, without declaring the traditions to be inviolate through millenia- it looks like the same harp depicted in the famous wedding of Strongbow and Aoife painting,but some declare that current playing method has little resemblance. The bigger test will be seeing whether similar families will ever arise in the future.
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Music
Jun 20, 2020 11:54:51 GMT
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Post by Séamus on Jun 20, 2020 11:54:51 GMT
Vale: Dame Vera Lynn Apparently with a mind outstanding for 103,I wonder,whatever her last illnesses,how lucid she'd been during the last couple of weeks and what were her thoughts if the favourite singer of the War's servicemen witnessed her own countrymen attacking Churchill's statue and tearing down others? Or if she could read one British journalist appealing to Yeats' 1921 address to Seanad "the life and work of the people who built (Nelson's Pillar) are part of our tradition. We should accept the whole past of our nation..."? Might be worth noting that the natural wonder which was the subject of Lynn's second-most enduring hit,was already in the minds and imaginations of people who had been born and reared in another hemisphere and never been to the British Isles (until adulthood): "As the ferry approached Dover the next morning after an unsteady crossing,she felt an impatience to see the White Cliffs, although she had not felt any such desire to see other sights. This daughter of the Highlands-MacKillop wrote,'If I felt that for England's Cliffs,what,you may imagine,must I not wish to see if I go near Scotland'"(cf Mary MacKillop,an extraordinary Australian, Paul Gardiner SJ) Hopefully we WILL all meet again.
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Post by Séamus on Aug 6, 2020 8:44:20 GMT
I wonder was the dying Jack Charlton able to enjoy, to some degree, the news of Leeds United's return to the Premier League? His funeral procession,which was reportedly attended by many expatriate Irish,was accompanied by a bagpiper playing Mark Knopfler's Local Hero. I love creativity and a version of the same piece which included uillean pipes was recorded some years back,but were they aware that one of NewcastleFC's anthems comes from the same Knopfler solo album?
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Post by Maolsheachlann on Nov 6, 2020 9:18:52 GMT
Does anyone here like the Bee Gees?
I'm a big fan. My wife hates them.
"Night Fever" is probably my all-time favourite song by anyone.
I say I'm a big fan, but I only know their hits.
I wonder has any band that has been so successful been less pretentious? They seemed to have been happy to sing catchy love songs their entire career, more or less. As far as I know, anyway.
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Post by assisi on Nov 6, 2020 17:20:20 GMT
Does anyone here like the Bee Gees? I'm a big fan. My wife hates them. "Night Fever" is probably my all-time favourite song by anyone. I say I'm a big fan, but I only know their hits. I wonder has any band that has been so successful been less pretentious? They seemed to have been happy to sing catchy love songs their entire career, more or less. As far as I know, anyway. Love 'Massachusetts' but leave the room when the disco stuff comes on. Here's a song from the 60s I was listening to last night which is great. The female singer came from Australia (The Bee Gees spent some of their younger years in Australia). www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZf41UudAbI
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Post by Séamus on Nov 7, 2020 9:38:34 GMT
Does anyone here like the Bee Gees? I'm a big fan. My wife hates them. "Night Fever" is probably my all-time favourite song by anyone. I say I'm a big fan, but I only know their hits. I wonder has any band that has been so successful been less pretentious? They seemed to have been happy to sing catchy love songs their entire career, more or less. As far as I know, anyway. Love 'Massachusetts' but leave the room when the disco stuff comes on. Here's a song from the 60s I was listening to last night which is great. The female singer came from Australia (The Bee Gees spent some of their younger years in Australia). www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZf41UudAbI You Should Be Dancing is the one that I've found catchy, perhaps for it's unusual-ness. The impressive thing that I learnt from a mostly uninteresting biography of the brothers I read a couple of years ago was the songwriting skills that were used by others (Woman In Love [Streisand], Islands In The Stream [Rodgers, Pardon],several Diana Ross songs). I learnt this week that the late Sean Connery's first, short-lived marriage was to a Queensland actress,unlike the BeeGees in virtue of their short Queensland stay, largely forgotten in the Australian pantheon, despite an Oscar nomination. Should be remembered, while we're at it, that Sean's own award came from playing an Irish policeman. Much has been made of the fact that he first worked at polishing coffins. Perhaps one of the few that made more money at entertainment than mortuary. He'd never beat rags to riches status of the original Star Wars jawas, a cheap plastic figure of which reportedly sell now for +£10,000 in Britain's Midlands. Can hear Shirley Bassey singing Goldfinger to that!
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Post by Tomas on Nov 7, 2020 23:50:19 GMT
Does anyone here like the Bee Gees? I'm a big fan. My wife hates them. "Night Fever" is probably my all-time favourite song by anyone. I say I'm a big fan, but I only know their hits. I wonder has any band that has been so successful been less pretentious? They seemed to have been happy to sing catchy love songs their entire career, more or less. As far as I know, anyway. Always considered them shame-ish to hear. Perhaps the frequency of the falsettos? It wasn´t as odd too hear some of that from The Sweet for some reason. The few exceptions, the only songs I ever listened to, on the other hand hits durable to an excess. Best Gibb song ever, apart from the masterpiece "Woman in Love", the Barry-Barbra duet "Guilty". Wonder of music. But shaky Refrain lyrics could address, probably in absolute reversed meaning, the proclaimed winner in the terrible US loss (?) election. Worst Saturday night news reels in a lifetime. Conveyed with the entire smoothness of mass media, extra mashed spiced in endorphines and jingles. If that don´t make you feel sick right now, countless million more repeats (more of the junk news, not songs) will possibly do that trick on our behalf later, within the coming four years? Well, we all have something to be guilty of. No pop music memories without its share of guilty pleasures. Politics out of tune can never change that, either.
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Music
Nov 8, 2020 9:19:52 GMT
Post by Tomas on Nov 8, 2020 9:19:52 GMT
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Music
Nov 9, 2020 12:11:52 GMT
Post by assisi on Nov 9, 2020 12:11:52 GMT
Looks like you're a big Genesis fan, Tomas. I must admit that I have a soft spot for the group 'Yes' who were one of Genesis' fellow proponents of the 'Progressive Rock' genre as my older brother had a few of their albums. I'm sure there were a few Yes v Genesis rivalries back in the day, a smaller version of the Beatles v Rolling Stones (I was a Beatles man) rivalries.
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Music
Nov 10, 2020 18:59:41 GMT
Post by Tomas on Nov 10, 2020 18:59:41 GMT
Looks like you're a big Genesis fan, Tomas. I must admit that I have a soft spot for the group 'Yes' who were one of Genesis' fellow proponents of the 'Progressive Rock' genre as my older brother had a few of their albums. I'm sure there were a few Yes v Genesis rivalries back in the day, a smaller version of the Beatles v Rolling Stones (I was a Beatles man) rivalries. Genesis were first and long lasting love, while Yes has always been up there on the peak along them. In the comparison I´d say Genesis be Beatles, by structure in harmonies and melody, and Yes the Stones, rawer energy, more edge... (Maybe that´s why I also would chose the Beatles first). In their band history there are many similarities in terms of core members together and like changes in staff, longevity as well. A friend since youth bought me a whole magazine dedicated to Genesis not so long ago that was interesting read as "history" based on older interviews and articles republished from that magazine´s magazine. Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel, solo in the links above, while rather different in their own music both played a major part in the early efforts from the group. An anecdote I read about Yes indicate their interrelations were least as strained sometimes. Singer Jon Anderson being the most outlandish newagey, held in by the flamboyant big man Rick Wakeman! Once Jon wanted to try an idea like being pagan doing recording close to Mother Earth out in a wood. Not such a good idea, according to others, etc. To hear Mr. Wakeman tell stories in Grumpy Old Men was quite a treat in the early 2000s. One story had something about "the feeling of hunger you get after drinking the 11th pint" or some such thing.
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Music
Nov 23, 2020 1:37:40 GMT
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Post by Séamus on Nov 23, 2020 1:37:40 GMT
Máire Brennan's recent announcement that she has pulmonary fibrosis and may only have functioning lungs for a couple of years could easily inspire a new volume of Celtic Twilight poems. Of course in a less globalised society there would be little fear of wondering how many in the next generation will take up the baton for Irish singing and language...a mhile grá
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