davidjodonoghue-blog

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The Messers’ Manifesto: ‘’The Sesh” as a revolutionary model for a new society

 A spectre is haunting Official Ireland: the spectre of the sesh. All the powers of the anti-craic find themselves aligned against it; the boys in the Dail, the shades, nosey neighbours and your man who gives you the eye for buying off-brand energy drinks, rollies and a frozen wedges at half four on a Wednesday morning.Gaffs and gigs the country round tremble and shake with its unconscious power and in the pre-dawn morning revellers, artists and undesirables dilate like pupils alive with its revolutionary potential.

The Sesh is a concept that seems to escape easy verbal explanation and whose ramifications for discourses surrounding class and the performance are the kinds of things you can only expound upon if you’re the sort of moribund muck savage whose life is empty enough and ego big enough that he might explore such a thing in a big wall of text no one is likely to make it through.

But if the Sesh as a cultural construction can expose the myth of a “classless” Irish society, its essence can also provide a template for developing the kind of radically democratic, egalitarian and just society where we might have peace, bread and craic. Embedded in our indescribable notions of a “serious session” are intellectual and material elements which challenge the most abominable prejudices and emphasise principles that might create a new society were they allowed to slip out from the shelter of shabby study accommodation into the wider world. To adapt an old slogan of those mad sesh gremlins of Paris 1968 “When parliament has become a mouldy 4am gaff sesh, then the mouldy 4am gaff will become parliament”.

Hash, Hunter-Gatherers and an economy of need

“Could I scab a rollie off you bai?”

It’s three in the morning and the cacophonous product of a creaky Aux cord is hardly keeping your friend’s conversation about how “Lizard people run the Premier League” submerged enough to not be irritating. You look up at the stranger whose begging for the remains of the John Player you scraped together the last of your dole for. His eyes are hungry; the hunger of a man whose flash frozen cans of Galahad are probably still defrosting themselves from frothing chunks in his churning stomach. You recognise that hunger and, without grudge of grumble, scrape together the last of your tobacco with a Costa loyalty card and form the single most perfect rollie imaginable. The pristine, white, straight shape of it makes it look like a smokeable shooting star. You hand it over and all the grovelling gratitude and weeping in the world has nothing on the curt nod and “Sound man” this stranger offers you. He disappears into the maelstrom of the sesh and leaves you only with a warm feeling of empathetic satisfaction; or is that just come up sick working its way up your gullet?

The generosity and giving spirit of the Sesh challenges the essential moral religion of our economic and political framework: that human beings are all nasty feens deep down, begrudging arseholes lunging through their lives in the constant spirit of cuthroat competition. But these simple acts of Sesh generosity rail against this grim view of humanity, as we desire to share the craic with as many as possible.The sesh is not alone in this regard and mirrors the hundreds of different systems of social and economic organisation that human beings have adapted in our long history of experimentation with civilisation; from hunter gatherers to Jesus-loving proto-hippies to Spanish anarchists. That time you threw a lad a few of your cans because the offie was closed? Little did you know but your desire to have one more sesh gremli in the trenches with you defied a ruling philosophy of greed and recklessness which has been the moral religion of the West for forty years or more and illustrated the anthropological notion of “baseline communism”; that human beings will generally share resources in the interest of building community given that the need is great enough or the cost small enough.

Anything with a pulse and a playlist: egalitarianism and the sesh

The essence of the sesh is diversity. Moroccan hash, french house, and a bag your friend swears was flown in straight from “the ‘dam”. The greatest seshes are not ruled by a monochrome, hegemonic conformity; that is the spirit that evenings spent at “craft beer tastings” are built of, the hedonistic and intellectual horizons of such an evening never really moving beyond the three square miles where those sorts of dry shites who might be in attendance have never left. The Sesh is built on the elements of the creative mind which Keats called “negative capability”; one’s ability to dwell in the diverse and ambiguous elements of the human condition and to be intoxicated by it. Black fellas, white fellas, culchie fellas, lady fellas, fellas who love other fellas? Why not, the more the merrier.All comers are welcome so long as they are down for the dynamic and democratic debauchery of the sesh. Prejudice is the anti-craic and the only acceptable discrimination based on identity or skin colour is when your friend starts complaining about “Alien grays influencing Top of the Pops” through the gurn as the sun breaks.

The sesh understands that the performance and pratice of differing identities, cultures and beliefs is not most vindicated by their recognition by the stormtroopers of the ant-craic but by their exuberant and confident performance in an environment of loving reciprocity which can challenge those very insitutions of the anti-craic.

Fuck the shades: The Sesh as anti-authoritarian festival

As American radical Hakim Bey put it, people who live in societies dominated by the repression and anti-craic of state structures and a capitalist socioeconomic system have a tendency to create “temporary autonomous zones”, small pocket universes of resistance to a reality of dull suppression and suffering. The sesh cannot be contained within the borders of the corporate sponsored club nights presented for our anaesthetisation by our masters in the world of politics and business, the spirit of the sesh is something that we carry in our hearts, deconstructing and reconstructing it in its every changing and always beautiful kaleidoscope patterns in gaffs, alleyways, bus stops and smoking areas around the country. The Sesh does not submit itself to the authority of the landlord or the policeman but, instead of fizzling out in outright conflict with these forces and serving as a means to legitimise and demonstrate their authority, it disappears and slips underneath doorways like a wisp of hash smoke, ready to reconstitute and reform in other hallways and in the hearts and minds of its revellers.

The discourse and practice that surrounds the sesh is indicative of the most inspiring and entertaining aspects of the Irish spirit; the playful sarcasm and sense of subversion that animates all of our speech and allows us to produce satirists and sonnet-writers in equal measure. It is a language and an attitude which playfully subverts authority; whether the authority of British imperial forces or the authority of that one beefy lad from Campus Security who “i swear to god man, actually has it out for me”. The sesh will accept no spectre of tyranny or domination, only the democratic traditions and codes of conduct that we accept in the spirit of the common good. In the spirit of democratic rebellion you should always pass the doobie on the left hand side, but no one puts you in a cage if you don’t. Our revelry is our resistance.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Colonising Common Sense: The Right’s greatest victory and how the Left can fight back

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In the political discourse of British politics at the moment there is a vision of a fertile, uninhabited political land which drips like honey from the mouths of political correspondents. Mystic, smoky visions of its verdant plains come back piecemeal in euphoric, Oxbridge-inflected descriptions from the brave explorers who venture to the dark and strange hinterlands from which the disastrous horror of Brexit has been the only audible communique in recent years. The modern missionaries of the City and Westminister have to daub the saliva from their lips when they think of this perfect, unspoiled potential political colony known only as “The Centre”.

This mysterious ‘centre ground’ is treated with reverence by the journalistic set which writes about politics not as a force by which to achieve positive change in the lives of ordinary people but instead views politics in the way one might view professional sports: a self contained system whereby a number of elite players attempt to wrest power from one another through the use of celebrity personalities and archaic systems of strategies. The most coveted play of all in this horse-race political reporting is the play on this ‘centre ground’, the supposedly objective and rational middle path between right and left ideological deviations. Of course this avaricious slobbering over the centre ground has emerged from the now reconfirmed leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, a figure portrayed as a raving, lunatic leftist out to seize our freedom and property.

This, of course, is an illusion.

Talking to any person who counts themselves as a member of the radical left will quickly throw up a view of Corbyn which is positive but also sceptical. The idea that Corbyn’s proposals, if not his historical political character, are somehow ravingly far-left is an absolute nonsense. Corbyn, much like his counterpart Bernie Sanders in the states, presents a vision of state-backed, welfarist social democracy that often is not meaningfully to the left of the domestic positions of the likes of Dwight Eisenhower. It is this sober-eyed look at the actually political coordinates of the positions of the supposed “raving Trotskyites” of whom the media warn us which reveals for us the true nature of the “centre ground” which the Corbyn leadership have supposedly ceded to the Tories: it is in fact intensely right wing.

The greatest victory of the right wing in the past forty years has been their colonisation of the ideas of “common sense” and “the centre ground”. The things which we regard as being “beyond ideology” or somehow objective and rational are in fact, by the standards of the post-war welfare state, intensely right wing propositions. The most famous proponent of the centre ground in recent political history was of course Tony Blair with his “Third Way” philosophy which was in fact an extremely right wing doctrine riven with rolling back the meagre protections the post-war state had built up for the destitute and unashamedly increasing state power when it came to surveying citizens and waging atrocious wars. The right has taken the supposedly apolitical idea of ‘realism’ for themselves, ensuring the reality that we appeal to is one of hyper-privatisation and endless war. The once lunatic doctrines of the fringe right, whether the law-and-order neoconservatism of Leo Strauss or the dream of corporate tyranny feverishly spewed from the mouths of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek, have in fact become our political reality. The Right have captured common sense and by their mastery over what appears as our reality have allowed criticism of capitalism or imperialism not only to be portrayed as misguided or incorrect; but in fact as aberrations from reality, as arguments which are tantamount to critiquing the law of gravity.

But what can be done about this?

In the coming decades the revolutionary left is faced with two monumental crises which we must seize, talk about and respond to if democratic and left wing notions are to shape the new reality. The first is automation and the mass unemployment crisis. Political analysis is useful because it can reveal that things which we take as the factual basis of reality (Capitalism is an efficient economic system, war is necessary, women are inferior) are in fact feverish ideological statements which come from the paranoid fantasies of a privileged mindset. One of the most closely held tenets of modern capitalism is that everyone much be engaged in productive and directly profitable work in order to have value to our society. Our view of work and employment under capitalism has drifted beyond the rationalism into the fetishistic, we elevate work to the point where we murder the disabled in an attempt to manufacture them into worthy and productive citizens. But all that will soon change. The age of mass automation of at least the services sector of the economy will force us to rethink our notion of employment. Self driving cars and McDonald’s service kiosks are only the glowing larvae of a technological locust swarm which will eat away at our notions of the necessity of productive work as a moral force. Increasingly we are coming to believe that machines will soon replace human workers at a greater rate than people can be upskilled. We will soon be confronted with a future where many people will be unable to find employment and there we must make a decision, do we continue our moral belief that human beings must crush their spirits pouring hot water through beans on zero hour contracts in order to earn the right to a meagre existence, or do we absolutely affirm a human being’s right to exist by virtue of their birth and give them the space and resources to pursue their own interests and innovation? The first choice, the natural choice of our current right-wing paradigm, is a world of contradictions and misery where society is run by those who already have the wealth to control the machine-mind which has replaced human labour. The latter, the choice which the left can seize and consistently affirm, is the one which could lead to an age of endless creativity and genius, where human beings are unshackled by the moral requirement of soul-crushing and unnecessary employment.

The second great reality-shaking event in the coming decades will be climate change. The political centre ground has reacted to the scientific data and the emaciated polar bears first by shoving their fingers in their ears and lately by proposing corporate paydays posing as meagre reforms such as emissions trading. But the left can grasp this apocalyptic vision of environmental destruction in the same way the religious right of Ronald Reagan and Bush used the vision of Christian rapture to drive terrible wars in the Middle East The looming reality of climate change can be a useful tool to critique one of the centre ground assumptions of “rational politics”, that only the unending, vampiric exploitation of our global resources by corporate oligarchs can drive forward the engine of human technological progress which always has been, of course, a machine run on the blood and tears of the developing world, sucking in the lifeless bodies of Third World civilians and growing more sophisticated in its harvesting of their livelihoods and environments the more of them it cripples in its cogs. The left can use the first awful pangs of environmental destruction to articulate a new vision of human progress founded on eco-socialist ideas; intertwining human technological development with a push for environmentally conscious innovation that drives the tendency toward popular democracy as communities are intimately connected with the decision-making process surrounding the use of their land and resources.

For now ‘common sense’ is a barren idea, appeals to reality are merely the surrender to a reality created for us by the wealthy corporate elite. The left should not retreat into the comfort of the social democratic past, but seek to forge a new future by utilising global upheaval to make the reality of the coming decades a defiantly left reality; a reality of abundance, democracy, sustainability and justice.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Fuck World Peace

I think you can tell a lot about the socioeconomic relations of a society and its invisible levers of power by the way it represents the fantastical. Our societies magic shows and religious rites are predicated on its factory floors and call centres, the wildest fever dreams of our body politic are underlied by the restlessness of its digestive system. Consider one of our culture’s persistent and recurring fantasties: the granting of wishes.

Say you happen upon a quaint little antique shop in your gentrified neighbourhood, a collection of commidified memories nestled between a gluten-free burrito pop up and a cereal bar. You stroll in and, spotting an ancient and “Oriental” looking lamp, you give the thing a rub and out pops a mystical genie. Before the mystified cashier can hurriedly mark up the product for its new supernatural significance its ethereal occupant decides to grant you, you miserbale sod, three wishes of your chosing because of the fate of your wandering hands.

In our cultural depictions this scenario generally follows a pattern: economic need, extravagence and a social wish thrown in as something of an afterthought. So you’ll grant yourself unlimited wealth, a solid gold toilet seat for pure decadence and-hesitating a moment as you ponder the social irresponsibility that your peers in the Fairtrade community cafe will cluck their tongues at you for- you wish for ‘world peace’.

‘World Peace’.

There is no greater socio-linguistic marvel than to witness than a grand and hopeful goal turning into an empty aphorism- like watching the Pacific Ocean evaporated away by Climate change and seeing marine life wriggle and suffocate helplessly in the dust. It is an empty incantation that flows as easily from the mouths of corporate money-grabbing missionaries as it does from human rights campaigners and pagent queens. It is a phrase which blows brittle through our fantasy lives like a hermit crab’s discarded shell-once home to life and infinite possibility and now only a hallmark vestige of a thing to be added to some bore’s collection of significant ephemera.

It’s interesting that our culture views the process of working toward an international order of peace and solidarity as being so remote as to be relegated to the twin fantasy worlds of lamp-bound genies and stoned college freshman conversations. This belies an international order where the sustained pursuit of peace is a push against the overwhelming current of corporate war profiteering and neo-imperialist conquest. Peace is a thing which lives in the world of magic and fairies, not in the world of markets and parliaments.

But fuck World Peace.

No really, fuck World Peace. The term and its cultural baggage are symptomatic of the problems of modern Liberalism (in th US sense) more generally. Wishy-washy, patronising, non-committal and more about virtue-signalling than real analysis and problem solving. “World Peace” isn’t something that can be worked for by the global community and fosterd by democracy and equality, it is only a state of affairs to be handed down by the almighty fist of some supernatural entity. It is an empty dream to be foisted on the oppressed peoples of the earth by the good-natured, socially conscious liberals of the Western World, after they get their trillions and their Ferraris of course. It is a fantastical gift given with a mixture of contempt and self-satisfaction, an optimistic corporate mission statement on the same old agenda that’s elected countless wide-eyed Democratic Presidents- slaughter in the developing world, pop cultural jokes at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.

If I may paraphrase my favourite of MLK’s quotes, World Peace is for those who are “more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”. In our fantasies of World Peace the troublesome squabblers of the world, primarily those petty barbarians of the Middle East, are enlightened to resolve their differences in an instant, suddenly rendered unconscious of the crimes of the Empire which are at the root of these conflicts in the first place.

Let us replace the fantasy of “World Peace” with the lasting reality of Global Justice. Let us build a new order not on the basis of the fantasy of World Peace at the top of the viscious ledger of the Corporate account book, but on the basis of real and democratic conversations between oppressed communities and an intense study of history and global responsibility that every section of the human family can take part in. If we are to take the modern system of corporate feudalism for “order” then let us aspire to disorder, let us aspire to rend this reality asunder not with the magic of the genie but with the voice of the voiceless.

Lets put and end to World Peace once and for all.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Dutch Gold and Debord: The class politics of “Humans of the Sesh”

In the parade of selfies, inspirational memes and baby pictures it’s unusual that you stumble across a facebook post that gets you thinking about critical theory and mid-twentieth century French leftism but it does happen. A post by a friend and performer who I much admire had just such an effect on me when he levelled a searing critique at the explosion of “sesh heads” in Irish social and discursive life over the past year, who have scuttled out into our social world like whippet-addled weevils boring out of the woodwork.

“I love how everyones a mad "SESH head" these days but when myself and the boys were getting off our boxes back in the day, people who are now "SESH heads" were calling us "Scumbags" “

As the only irritating bore who can turn jokes about slugging back flagons of Linden into a meditation on capitalism this idea really struck a chord with me. Where does this culture of “the sesh” come from an how are its terms, phrases and shibboleths used both to promote and subvert radical class discourse?

Humans of the Sesh is one of the only reasons I log into facebook anymore. It’s irrerverant posts takes the sappy, NPR-esque “everyone has a story” liberalism of Humans of New York and turns it on its head. It presents pictures of earnest looking hipsters and appends to them wild tales of being “on the sesh”; snorting huge lines of ketamine in between plugging ecstasy up your rear end. It hilariously satirises the twee melodrama of viral content and uses it to prod at the layers of social identity and falsification that separate our “sessioning selves” from the neat and tidy selves we labour over in perform in our public working and schooling lives. It mirrors the Rubberbandits’ brilliant use of a defiantly working class voice to satirise and analyse the entrenched power structures of “Official Ireland” as well as the neat a proper complacency of acceptable Irish liberalism.

But the way in which the language of the page has seeped into the everyday conversation of Irish youth culture has also led to a more pernicious phenomenon: a kind of class tourism where the struggles and lived experience of working class and impoverished sectors of Irish society become hilarious accessories for a Dutch Gold selfie-taking middle class.

French left wing intellectual Guy Debord (one the north stars of my critical thought) spoke about the concept of “recuperation”. This was the process whereby powerful and radical ideas of experiences were absorbed by the status quo in such a way as to legitimise the oppression and devastation that they were once supposed to oppose. Think about how we got from Stonewall to Pride Parades sponsored by Google. Debord wrote:

“To recuperate words is really to recuperate what they represent; so that the only activity that words describe is the activity the recuperated words describe. It follows that the true meanings of the words merely become aspects of their false meanings, the true activity they describe merely aspects of their false activity.”

Or, to put it in a more palatable way that can be heard from outside the orbit of my own pseudo-intellectual rear end, the “sesh” in popular usage becomes something outside of the sesh itself. It is removed from the radical joy of youth culture and the sardonic relay of working class culture to become an empty slogan. Middle class “sesh heads” crunch their faces up at the taste of their selfie-ready cans of Druids before stumbling into Coppers and sticking to the Orchard Thieves for the night. They pridefully carry pouches of Johnny Player Blue until they are offered more appealing Marlboro Lights in the smoking room. As they waddle home they are careful to avoid the ruffians sipping on Linden Village for fear of a mugging as they post about what an epic “sesh” they’ve had.

Humans of the Sesh seems to recognise this ignorant discursive robbery on their own page as they gleefully post pictures of preening Donnybrook “sesh heads” posing with their “rollies”. This alchemy whereby the necessities of working class deprivation are turned into the accessories of middle class style is symptomatic of a broader class unconsciousness in Irish society. Irish society denies the existence of any socioeconomic inequality and insists on a class porousness that is an evident and laughably fiction.

I must note that this criticism comes from a place not of superiority but of self-flagellation. My upbringing has afforded me enough time and leisure to peruse French intellectual thought and treatises on class dynamics without ever really having to struggle for anything. My comfortable life and BA allow me to joke about getting wrecked down the town park on “tashty aul tins” without having to confront the reality of the situation I am mocking. The discursive recuperation of the sesh is not only the anti-craic but also serves to entrench economic inequality and silence discussion of social immobility in modern Ireland. So if you want to be a true sesh-head, drop the Bulmers Pear and pick up Das Kapital.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Summer Reading: Tristessa- Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was my bible as a Beat-obsessed teen. The ecstatic prose, the sense of youthful wanderlust, the rejection of authority and rebellion against society in the search for transcendent meaning. I will always love Kerouac and I devour his work eagerly. I always slip back into his prose with the ease and comfort of a favourite piece of clothing. The rhythm of his writing is infectious and I always notice my prose inflected with a little bit of Kerouac shortly after reading his work.

Tristessa was okay. I often find some of Kerouac’s work ages poorly with much of its energy being very adolescent in nature. It can all seem a bit hokey to older eyes. The underlying sense of misogyny in some of Kerouac’s work has never been more evident than here in the way that he fetishizes the young Tristessa, even if some of his imagery is remarkably beautiful. The inflections of Buddhist philosophy are charming when either an integral part of the text (Dharma Bums) or when sparingly used (Lonesome Traveller) but here they seem unwieldy and out of place. It all smacks of Kerouac trying to convince you of how much he knows of Eastern thought. On the subject of the opiate addictions of his companions Kerouac writes with great richness, comparable to Burroughs, and Kerouac’s descriptions of Mexico are evocative. The prose seems to fall apart toward the end, even as the plot itself becomes more intriguing. Still Kerouac will always hold a charm for me and I expect to see through to the end my mission of reading everything he has written.

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Short Story: “Waster- A Modern Irish Myth”

https://soundcloud.com/davidjodonoghue-1/waster-a-modern-irish-myth

A short story of mine, a reinterpretation of the Celtic Myth of the Wasting Sickness of Cuchulainn for the modern day.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Summer Reading- Lets Explore Diabetes with Owls- David Sedaris

I remember the first time I encountered the hilarious, semi-autobiographical essays of David Sedaris. I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts- This American Life- when this guy came on. His voice was nasal and whiny and my immediate reaction was “Jesus! This is like nails on a chalk board. Maybe I should skip this segment. Nah, i’ll just wait it out”. And wait it out I did. And a grimace turned to a grin, a giggle into a guffaw, and a terrible first impression led to a trip to the search bar at thisamericanlife.org, typing in ‘David Sedaris’ and submerging myself in every syllable of Sedaris I could find.

Oddly, this is actually the first of Sedaris’ books I’ve ever read, although I’ve listened to plenty of his readings and read a bunch of his work in The New Yorker etc. Thankfully his voice doesn’t become tedious over the course of 200 pages but in fact even more enjoyable. His persona and humour have always reminded me a little bit of the qualities I love about Woody Allen: the neuroticism, the self awareness, the cynicism and the self-aware faux-intellectualism. I’ve always found that few mix the hilarious with the poignant quite as well as Sedaris with his essays being as likely to elicit a chuckle as a feeling of breath-robbing melancholy (for the latter I recommend this http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/28/now-we-are-five written following Sedaris’ sister’s suicide).

The essays inside are all classic Sedaris, broaching topics from sexuality to parenting to dentistry to taxidermy. I’ve always found the way that Sedaris enagages with his sexuality to be really entertaining. I always find the humour and light heartedness with which writers like Sedaris and Dan Savage discuss their homosexuality to be a great way of demystifying the gay male, especially for those of a more conservative bent who may have a negative image surrounding gay men. At the same time Sedaris touches on the loneliness and poignancy of growing up gay in an environment where homosexuality was unspeakable.

Sedaris’ writing will always remain a comfort to me, if only to provide a chuckle along with a reminder that I am not, in fact, the most neurotic person on earth

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Summer Reading: Jon Ronson- The Men Who Stare at Goats

While I might miss college immensely during the summer, one positive to the months without chicken rolls and staring bleary-eyed at powerpoints on Brecht is the way the summer frees up my reading list. No longer am I weighed down by huge academic tomes week in week out, but I can putter along and read whatever I damn well please, taking my time with it and really growing comfortable in the pathways and portraits of wonderfully pretty prose, without worrying about the essay I’ll have to write afterwards.

Given this I think this blog might be a good space to have a chat about each book as I finish it. My overall goal would be to best my book quota last summer, where I hit 25, and taking the time to write a little bit about each book enriches the experience for me.

In about 24 hours I finished Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats. I’m a huge fan of Welsh journalist Ronson and really loved his nonfiction book about conspiracy theorists: Them: Adventures with Extremists. Ronson has often been compared to another favourite British non-fiction writer of mine, Louis Theroux and I have always loved the way that both treat their subjects, often the quirky and marginalised folks in society, with a kind of respect and openess that allows the universal truths of these peoples’ wacky ideologies to come through. Far from being a modern freakshow, Theroux and Ronson treat stories of the strange with an honest and accepting journalistic integrity that always gives one food for though.

The men who Stare at Goats was turned into a film 2009 starring George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey. Reception was lukewarm but I believe this has a lot to do with the way in which the film takes the whole story of a secret corps of psychic spies in the US army and plays it for the black comedy that it obviously is on the surface. With the book this wacky story of telekinetic colonels is just how Ronson reels you in, but throughout the work he uses this hook to paint a darker picture of modern torture, military excess, black budgets and massive human rights violations. Ronson’s trademark humour always remains a wonderful companion, giving the reader a sane voice to identify with in this world of mind-reading military madness. Ronson’s book makes for a short and entertaining romp, but it is the way that it strings together espionage and black ops from MK Ultra to Project Jedi to Operation Just Cause that really leaves you with food for thought. While we might laugh along at the US army dumping millions into teaching soldiers to stop goats’ hearts with only mental powers, we’re left wondering if even more money might be going to something much more sinister, all without any oversights or concern.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Published work roundup: Magic, Mad Max and MK-Ultra

Here’s a little roundup of some of the work I’ve published on other sites lately, hopefully you might see something you like!

http://campus.ie/surviving-college/politics/british-politics-broken

Here I analyse the British electoral system and the ramifications that the latest election has for its continued existence. Basically, the British election system is a bloody shambles and needs sorting out

http://ultraculture.org/blog/2015/05/05/5-times-psychedelics-spirituality-were-used-weapons/

Moving on to the weird side of things, over at Ultraculture I’m talking about how occult and spiritual techniques, as well as psychedelic drugs, have been used for evil in the past

http://www.headstuff.org/2015/05/w-b-yeats/

Continuing my theme of the magical and the mystical I discussed the influence that magic and communicating with spirits had over the poetry of WB Yeats

http://filmireland.net/2015/05/23/gender-and-the-genre-film-mad-max-fury-road-and-the-diversity-of-the-wasteland/

Then over at Film Ireland I talked about how the amazing new Mad Max movie works both as an astonishingly fresh and inventive action film and also one of the finest feminist narratives I’ve ever seen in a genre film.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Dark illustrations by Philipp Banken

Philipp Banken born 1984 in Haan is a freelance illustrator from Cologne, Germany. Specialised on figurative art in the techniques of drawing, painting and traditional graphic work as well as digital illustration, his work is puplished in books, magazines and printed artworks. His website.

Following us on Facebook increases the chance of discovering more talented artists. Now that’s cool.

posted by Margaret

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The devil you know: An “enhanced interrogation” of neo-conservative themes in Netflix’s Daredevil

Far be it from me to generalise, but the people who engage with comic books and the pop culture that surrounds them tend not to be conservative. It’s unlikely that there’s a whole lot of cross over in the hectic Venn diagram of Comic Con and your average evangelical service of Ted Cruz speech. By and large the various nerd fandoms tend to lean toward progressive ways of thinking and, although the accusation of ‘nerd culture’ being a boy’s club still hold some validity, the foregrounding in recent years of female creators and fans as well as the entering of lgbtq+ topics into the mainstream comic book discourse has been a wonderful thing to watch. It’s unlikely that the average Avengers fan is going to attend a rally of support for Jeb Bush, decked out in a Captain America costume and ready to lead the charge on another invasion of Iraq one vibranium shield at a time.

But all the same conservatism has made quite an impact on the history of comics. Frank Miller, much and all as his star has faded, can still be considering one of the most influential modern comic writers. As a batfan, I’ll still regularly go back and read classics like The Dark Knight Returns and Batman:Year One with an enormous sense of enjoyment. However I have to say this enjoyment can’t help but be soured, knowing that the creator of these works is a viciously misogynistic and racist man who wrote a book about a vigilante who mercilessly murders horrific caricatures of “muslim terrorists”. Stepping back one can see how the superhero narrative of clear cut and evident good guy vs bad guy narrative can feed into an imperialistic neo-conservatism. Batman is the guy who goes outside the bounds of the law, often using vicious and terrifying methods to defend the world from an evil the rest of the world doesn’t realise the gravity of. Hell the only thing he needs to make the comparison any clearer is a PATRIOT act is spy on private citizens without a warrant…oh wait.

The neoconservative movement, of which the Bush Babes like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were prominent leaders, began in the United States decades ago. It all originated from a Chicago academic called Leo Strauss, a professor of classical political philosophy who despised liberal America. Strauss saw liberalism, with its promotion of individuality, egalitarianism and freedom, as a debauched, debased and hedonistic kind of philosophy with no grounding in principle or tradition which would eventually cause the United States to collapse. What makes me more interested in Strauss though, and what makes him especially relevant to this piece, is the influence that popular culture had on his political ideas. Strauss gleaned as much inspiration from television as he did from Plato when it came to his conservative philosophy. He loved shows such as Gunsmoke and Perry Mason, where morally strong and able heroes ruthlessly dispatch the evils of society. In this way narrative is absolutely vital to the neoconservative view of the world, casting themselves as the morally righteous good guys who get things done and calling onto the stage a variety of demonic caricatures to slay from “communists” to “Muslim extremists”.

So what does this have to do with Netflix’s Daredevil?

Well much and all as I might love the show and love the character, as I analyse further and further I can’t help but feel that it does lend itself to a kind of neoconservative reading. It’s no accident that the aforementioned Frank Miller was the man who kickstarted Daredevil as we know him today with his 1980s storyline Born Again, which introduced the idea of Daredevil’s struggle with religious faith as a central component of his character. The new Daredevil series, which regularly draws on Miller’s work, can certainly be seen in the light of a neoconservative discourse. The nature of all vigilante fiction often strays into such an area, with the moral man who is above the law cast against the ineffectiveness of the liberal establishment of courts hearings and fair trials. What makes Daredevil more interesting is the neoconservative strongman and the liberal system of fair hearing are embodied in one man: Matt Murdock and Daredevil, a lawyer and a vigilante. The concept of Daredevil existing as a kind of final resort for Matt when the legal system proves ineffectual is a deeply conservative idea. It speaks to the part inside all of us that wants to disregard this “innocent until proven guilty” preamble and act with our gut in displays of glorious revenge against perceived evils in the world. The need for Daredevil in this world is part of a broader discourse about the necessity of extra-legal action against those evils that deserve it, whether it’s the Kingpin or al-Qaeda. I shouldn’t, of course, have to explain the significance of Daredevil’s use of torture in pursuit of justice, much the same as the embrace of “enhanced interrogation” in the War of Terror.

Now don’t mistake this as me saying that you shouldn’t watch Daredevil because it is some kind of conservative propaganda. That’s utterly ridiculous. I love the show and I think everyone should give it a watch. But I think it makes an interesting lens through which to view the politicised nature of even the most seemingly apolitical narratives and the degree to which ideology is entrenched in our pop culture. We should all be a little more aware of the narratives being peddled to us in our favourite shows and their implications for the real world of geopolitics. Not that watching Daredevil is going to make you want to wage war in the Middle East, but get some ointment for that itchy trigger finger just in case.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

>>"Networks like animation because they don't have to pay the actors squat." >>"Plus they can replace them and no one can tell the diddly-ifference."

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

Students riots in Paris: Toppled cars are seen in Rue Gay-Lussac in Paris, France, on May 11, 1968.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

The Power in Powerlessness in the music of The Mountain Goats

“Get stomped like a snake/Lie down in the dirt/cling to my convictions/even when I get hurt”.

So go the first lines of Heel Turn 2, a prominent song on Indie folk band The Mountain Goat’s latest release. It’s the sort of teeth-gritting, eye-watering, fist-pumping statement that gives frontman John Darnielle’s lyrics so much of their grit and power. It’s the kind of sentiment that sees you squeezing your fists, piercing your palms, your arteries turned to forks of fire at the pain those words contain, ready to despair and power through all at once. It is lyrics like these that give me my cult-like devotion to the Mountain Goats. If the death metal loving vegan Darnielle were to erect a compound somewhere in the icy depths of Michigan’s upper peninsula and preach salvation through absolute obedience, I’m not saying I’d drink the Kool-Aid. But I’d probably taste it to see if the flavour is to my liking.

I don’t remember how I found the Mountain Goats. Normally this is the space where you’d put some great story about unearthing a band like Indiana Jones uncovering some gorgeous artefact. Stumbling into a live show by chance, a friend’s glowing recommendation or perhaps a cosmic vision bursting behind your eyelids, searing symbols pointing you in the direction of some really great EPs. But I don’t have one of those. I happened on ‘No Children’, the anti-love ballad from 2002’s Tallahassee, by chance in the “recommended videos” section of YouTube next to libraries of Leonard Cohen and bibliographies of Bob Dylan. From “I hope you die/I hope we both die”, it was love at first sound. I consumed and consumed, growing fat on everything Darnielle had ever produced, from live shows to early, garbled cassette offerings. If John Darnielle has so much as belched into a tape recorder at some point, it rests of my computer rated five stars on iTunes and carefully annotated.

But it is the sentiment I am talking about above, that power gained from powerlessness , that always entrances me in the lyrics of the Mountain Goats. It always reminds me of that scene in the New Testament when Paul speaks of having a thorn stuck in his skin and, in entreating God to remove it for him, God reveals that “His power is made perfect in weakness”. This beautiful paradox, of the power given to those who are suffering and wounded, has always been something that gives me a wonderful sense of resolve. I’d like to use this space to talk about some of my favourite instances in which Darnielle evokes this sentiment in the lyrics of the Mountain Goats.

Heel Turn 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKVY5_FB2i0

The quote at the top of this article is taken from Heel Turn 2 which was one of the first songs to be released from the Mountain Goats latest album Beat the Champ. The wrestling themed album gave me pause at first, but Darnielle’s genius for transmuting even the most niche of subjects into powerful and universal truth combined with his ability to find the heartbreaking truth even in the kitschiest cultural artefacts makes this album no less stunning than previous efforts. Heel Turn 2 documents a wrestler’s decision to ramp up the ferocity, tired of being seen as an ineffectual good guy and getting rewarded with beatings. I think this sentiment of holding onto a part of yourself, a conviction or a passion, while you suffer is a powerful one. We can hold our convictions in our chest like gorgeous sapphires, and even as the rest of us is beaten black and blue we can smile, knowing that we still carry a jewel inside. “You’ve found my breaking point/congratulations”, the mad, sarcastic declaration of this line is full of that classic John Darnielle vocal technique, a mixture of mad exuberance and breathless desperation in the face of a bad situation.

Psalms 40:2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7YQR27lykA

2009’s The Life of the World to Come is not among the best of the Mountain Goats albums, but it is among my favourites. It is among my favourites not only because it appeals to a fan of “the Bible as Literature, not just something to bash gays over the head with” such as myself, but also because it’s brave. Indie folk fans tend to fall into a pretty secular camp, at best going the “spiritual, but not religious route”, rejecting the sombre sermons of a Church for the pretty artwork of Tarot cards and stoned conversations about “like, the energy of the universe man” (both of those things applying to me more than most). Engaging with a tome like the Bible is a brave thing for someone in this camp of hippies and liberals. Darnielle’s takes a subject that might have made many of his fans uneasy or unsure, even myself, and bringing to it a real and effecting human warmth that communicates the malleability of Scripture. Just because the French Revolution led to head’s rolling through the street, doesn’t mean we reject democracy. In the same vein, just because the Westboro Baptist Church exists, doesn’t mean we can’t find some magic and artistic wonder in Christian scripture. And this is exactly what Darnielle does. One of my favourite songs on the album, in which all the tracks are named for Biblical verses, is Psalms 40:2. This aggressive thrill ride is a hymn for frayed nerves, at the end of their tether, blasting electrical impulses and soaked in the last of the day’s adrenaline. “Lord send me a mechanic/if I’m not beyond repair”. Song in so many way’s recaptures the spirit of early religion. That the power of faith is not for the clean-living, wealthy, upright man, but for the downtrodden. That it is for what Franz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth”, not for those who turn their nose up at them. That transcendental salvation, whether through religion or art, is for those who are stuck in the pit that the song predicts, wounded in the “burning fuselage of our days”, waiting to be raised high.

 Going to Spain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdPN4rD9EWk

John Darnielle knows what it’s like to be in that pit. An abusive stepfather, drug issues and a struggle to break though in music all dot his earlier years and leave their bruising impression on his words. The early songs exemplifying this, pristine verses filtered through the grime, grit and squeal of primitive recording equipment. There is something so raw and authentic in the fuzzy sound of these early tracks, gorgeous poems written on torn parchment in disappearing ink, all the more gorgeous for how ephemeral they are. Love has always been a common theme in art, from the 12th centuries troubadours burned and persecuted for giving their beloved equal standing to God to the modern bubble gum pop that blares out of tiny public bus speakers. But the first thing about the Mountain Goats that caught my ears was the attitude the lyrics showed toward this emotion. There was no simple dichotomy between bitter heartbreak and overwhelming infatuation. Darnielle recognise that the two exist on a spectrum and slip and slide into one another like paints mixing on an artist’s palette. Sometimes love is so powerful it’s destroying you, it can be a sickness and a curse, and sometimes you feel compelled to love but it’s just not there. Going to Spain is one of those tracks that finds power in powerlessness and explores the complexities of love. It calls out to a leaving lover, desperately trying to assure them that their departure isn’t going to affect you in the least, you’ll be stronger without them. It achieves a kind of desperate, yet doubting, sincerity.” I see you hold his hand. /I see you wave good-bye. /I don't know you anymore, /so I'm not going to cry, now,”. The song illustrates that love is all consuming and this is a double edged but in the painful sloughing off of infatuation, we can become powerful and new, although it may be difficult. The immensity of love is akin to the bombast and blast of an airplane, but in the power of pain, “it can’t touch me”.

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

why does the girl with the nosebleed in the cry for judas video just wipe her nose instead of putting a tissue in there to stop the bleeding, that isnt proper procedure.

You would have to ask the director. I don’t write and storyboard and direct the videos, I just show up and say “hey everybody it’s the guy whose hair is legendary throughout the nine kingdoms” and then somebody yells “hail the ninth kingdom!” and then the other people all sort of mutter “hail the ninth kingdom!” because on the last video when people refused to hail the ninth kingdom, the representative from the ninth kingdom sulked, and nobody needs that, positive energy is what we need even if it means occasionally hailing the ninth kingdom when we’re at best lukewarm on the ninth kingdom

alternate answer, always err on the side of extra blood

[davidjodonoghue-blog]

The appeal of religious imagery in Daredevil to secular millenials

The moment the time came I began my delicate and sacred preparations. The shelves of convenience stores were raided for the ceremonial feast while sacred libations were sought from the racks of cheap wine in the liquor store. The altar was set up just right, with the holy device perched atop it surrounded by offerings.

I knew I was in for something special when I set my laptop down on the table and sat down to binge watch the first season of Netflix’s new adaptation of Marvel’s superhero Daredevil.

The Netflix binge is a process almost sanctified for my generation, a process of pop culture prostration that involves scheduling and feasting in much the same way as so many religious offering and for many of us largely Godless millennials this procedure is about as close as we get to religiosity.

Daredevil is something very intriguing. The 13 episode series had my worried at first. As a fan of the Man Without Fear’s comic book capers my mouth still stung with the acrid taste of 2003’s less than stunning Ben Affleck vehicle Daredevil. But a number of things about the series reassured me early on: the deliciously dark atmosphere, the great acting, the sharp dialogue and the series’ bone-crunching violence. But the thing that I found most engaging and fascinating about this superhero origin story cum legal drama cum pulp noir piece is the attention paid to religion.

Daredevil is unusually among many of his fellow spandex wearers in the Marvel universe and beyond for his overt religiosity. Matt Murdock has long been impacted by his Catholicism, with his religion and its aesthetics and thematic features playing a regular role in his storylines.   Although Daredevil was first explicitly referred to as a Catholic in his comic run in the 1970s, it was in the 1980s that Murdock’s faith would come to be a major part of his character. It was Frank Miller (of The Dark Knight Returns fame) who would foreground the faith in his Daredevil story ‘Born Again’, which was laden down to religious imagery, iconography and terminology like an ark bursting with wild and vibrant animals.

Daredevil’s faith was hinted at in the middling 2003 adaptation with scenes taking place in a confessional box and a large, gothic cathedral, but it always seemed like a coat of cheap Catholic paint from a hardware store, only skin deep and hardly affecting the main structure of Murdock’s character. I found myself pleasantly surprised then by the manner in which Murdock’s faith was carefully intertwined with the depths of his character in this new Netflix miniseries, going beyond an initial scene taking place in a confessional box to weave itself into the ethics and emotions expressed by Charlie Cox as the titular hero.

How is it that a character so grounded in religion appeals to an audience consisting largely of Millennials, whose interest in organised religion is dropping like a rock?

Much as in the 2003 film the surface trappings of Murdock’s faith are all there, with scenes involving confession and a relationship with a parish priest, but it is the underlying elements that faith adds to Murdock’s character and the style of the story itself that makes religiosity such a fascinating element of the series. Firstly Murdock’s strong faith lends the character a kind of authenticity. Murdock is portrayed as an essentially working class character, regardless of his white collar education and profession. The sort of religiousness that wavers between lapsed and devout is common among working class individuals who grow up in historically poorer urban areas such as Hell’s Kitchen, making Murdock’s faith a comfortable fit for his character’s origins and an important tie to an area of the city it is implied his legal skills could have allowed him to escape from.

Most interesting perhaps is how one can connect Christian iconography to the grim and realistic violence of the show. This Daredevil is not like those other Marvel superheroes in the flashier cinematic universe, those Thors and Captain Americas who may get a cut here and a scuff there but nevertheless manage to continue to resemble pristine underworld models even as they thrash their way through waves of baddies. Daredevil gets hit, a lot. In the opening confessional box scene Murdock mentions how his boxer father had a strategy “ to let 'em hit him till they broke their hands.” His son seems to continue this tradition of taking punishment. The series is unafraid to show its hero pouring blood and clutching gruesome wounds, the grind of broken bone only inaudible because of the rain sizzling on the grey pavement. It is this gritty, punishing combat that gives the series some of its edge, but also seems to bear out its theological connection.

Even in the initial scene Murdock seems to connect his family’s ability to take brutal physical punishment, and sometimes almost thrive on it, to their religious affiliation. It has often been noted that Catholicism focuses on suffering to an almost morbid extent, focusing incessantly on the blood and gore of Christ’s crucifixion like horror movie fans with their eyes glued to the latest splatterfest. But the catholic fascination with punishment and suffering as agents of power and purification cleverly translate to the dark and blood-soaked action of Daredevil. It is in the moments when the protagonist drips blood struggles to stay on his feet that he seems to take on a kind of transcendent power, his determination in his weakness transmuted into a fearsome strength.

The series balance between courtroom drama and vigilante exploits is fascinating, often blending equal parts Law and Order and Batman to great effect. But the thematic thread that ties these scenes together are weighty considerations of right and wrong, crime and punishment. The ethics of the show are Old Testament in nature, showcasing with gruesome glee the vicious punishments dolled out to criminals by the suited vigilante, who includes torture within his repertoire of retribution. It is a harsh world, where sin is punished violently and blood is the currency of justice.

Netflix’s Daredevil is a runaway success, with massive critical acclaim and the dubious honour of being the second most pirated show following its release, running just behind the mega-popular Game of Thrones. While millennials such as myself may remain in large part apathetic about religion it is evident that religious themes and imagery in a storyline are not a turn off and can actually lend great narrative depth and visual flair to a piece of art. Although young people may have forsaken churches, the biblical themes of suffering, redemption and justice continue to be a draw, even if it is superheroes who are the new divine beings.