The Cedar Lounge Revolution

As RTÉ notes:

EU member states have held off imposing immediate retaliatory trade measures against the United States, including the use of the EU’s toughest response weapon, known as the Anti Coercion Instrument (ACI), according to an EU diplomat [over threats to Greenland].

The decision not to use the ACI, or to immediately reinstate some €93 billion in retaliatory tariffs against the Trump administration, which were suspended last summer to allow for the completion of the EU-US trade deal, was taken during an emergency meeting of EU ambassadors in Brussels.

“At present, there is no question of deploying the ACI or any other trade instrument against the US,” said the diplomat.

“The EU’s €93 billion in rebalancing measures have been suspended until 6 February.

“The EU will only decide after 1 February whether to extend that suspension.”

There’s a good reason not to do anything just yet – but a better reason to consider other non-retaliatory measures that could be considered in the interim. The good reason is that nothing as of yet has happened. The President of the US has threatened that tariffs will go into effect, those like Bessent have made rhetorical statements about ‘needing Greenland’. As of yet nothing substantively has changed. When it does, that’s a different matter. Perhaps wiser and cooler heads will prevail in Washington, but it makes little sense to escalate in economic terms until it’s clear just what the US is doing.

The better reason to consider other measures is much broader – and it goes well beyond economic aspects of this. At a minimum Greenland should be asked what sort of relationship it seeks, if any, with the EU. Their decision. Similarly with regard to defence. Their decision too. Greenland is in an interesting position, as part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but its representative bodies are legitimate and should be afforded a respect the US appears unable to do so.

There was a piece in Foreign Affairs about how the US could take Greenland almost by stealth across a couple of years. I’m a little sceptical because in this outline the US would all but set up parallel economic and political structures and effectively elbow Denmark out. That seems to suggest a remarkable passivity on the part of that state and others. But more importantly this does not appear to be the gameplan in Washington where pedal to the metal is the order of the day. Which makes one suspect that the idea is to essentially push by force of rhetoric and threats Denmark into ceding sovereignty in Greenland through some ‘purchase’ mechanism and as quickly as possible. Shock and awe as it were. Or bum rush, if you will. They’ve no patience for even the medium term haul of boxing clever and trying to prise Greenland away stealthily (and the situation in Venezuela underscores that, something that is lesser even that a coup or regime change – essentially the removal of a President of a sovereign state, a lot of rhetoric, but with the actual regime still in place). Everything is ‘now, now, now!’. It’s dumb, it’s utterly counterproductive to US interests, economic and international, and of course, almost needless to add, it’s unnecessary. But those are the times we live in. As someone said to me a month or two into the administration – these guys are drunk on power, they genuinely believe their own rhetoric and have no sense of its limitations.

Hence it’s been vital that other states have stepped up, and perhaps it is an indication that those states are finally realising that there’s no placating, or appeasing, this administration’s seemingly endless acquisitive fervour. That at some point there has to be a forceful no – but that needs, as noted above to be backed up by defence, economic and political measures that give real power to Greenlands sovereignty. And as importantly buttressing the sovereignty of other states that this administration might seek to undermine.

To download the above please click on the following links:

Please click here to go the Left Archive.

Many thanks to Joan Collins who forwarded this to the Archive. 

These are just a selection of documents donated to the Archive, more of which will be posted up next week. They include a ‘menu’ and stickers.  They relate to the campaign from 2019 where as the Journal relates:

 

REPRESENTATIVES FROM TRADE unions, the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) and former staff held a demonstration outside The Ivy restaurant in Dublin city centre today, calling for employers not to deny waiting staff their tips in the run up to Christmas.

Independent TD Joan Collins and two former Ivy workers were then due to meet with Dublin Lord Mayor Paul McAuliffe along with USI deputy president Michelle Byrne to discuss concerns about exploitation, tip theft and workers’ rights in the hospitality sector. 

“December is the busiest month  of the year for workers that rely on tips in the hospitality sector,” campaigners said in a statement. “This continues the campaign against the Scrooge-like bosses in certain restaurants and establishments in Dublin who continue to deny their workers their tips in the run up to Christmas.”

It follows action earlier this year from a number of activists outside the upmarket The Ivy restaurant to protest working conditions.

The issue came to light in November 2018, when staff at the Dawson Street venue were told they wouldn’t be allowed process payments from customers after management alleged some waiters were asking patrons to pay tips in cash, rather than on a credit card.

In a notice shared with RTÉ’s Liveline programme, it said this practice would stop the “deplorable greed” being shown to guests at the restaurant by those who request cash.

All examples welcome in comments.  

Not sure this is correct:

We are now two weeks into the Grok apoplexy. And despite the fact that a large tech company is facilitating the making of child abuse images and the harassment of women, nobody seems to be able to say definitively what laws are being broken, who is breaking those laws, and even whether this is a national or a European competence.

Someone is certain that their definition of neutrality is the correct one:

We know that neutral Ireland has always been a convenient political sedative. If Volodymyr Zelensky is basking in applause as he makes a speech in Dáil Éireann, obviously we are not neutral. Pick a side if you like, but stop pretending that’s neutrality.

A statement that begs for further details (and has been flatly contradicted by a range of political commentators and journalists over the last week or two).

From Ireland’s point of view, US political funding, which has been so important for Sinn Féin, has the potential to dynamise a Maga-inspired political movement in this country. Although there are theoretical limits on foreign political funding, Sinn Féin has shown that existing legislation is riddled with loopholes. 

And then there’s this

A frequent complaint by people is that the parties offer very little choice — that they are a so-called “uniparty”. It was a complaint made over 30 years ago by the then senior Labour adviser Fergus Finlay.

In his words, Ireland had a “policy dot”. When he coined that term, he was concerned that the party system and policy debate was dominated by the centre-right. The data from the manifestos shows that Ireland now has among the most left-wing party systems in Europe.

By identifying those “right-coded” items in the manifestos and taking away the “left-coded” items, we see that only Aontú is above zero, and it is essentially a centrist party. All other parties, including Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, fall firmly on the left of the political spectrum using this method.

And from May 2024, Michale Rother playing Neu! and Harmonia (kudos to the person who took the video).

Funny. A few months back there was an article n the Guardian which took issue with ‘the preponderance of albums from yesteryear in the contemporary charts’.

A quote gives a sense of it:

Looking at the Top 40 albums in the UK this week, it is clear that the charts have become a mausoleum. There are solid showings from Oasis (a compilation album originally released in 2010 and two studio albums from 1994 and 1995), Fleetwood Mac (a compilation from 2018 and a studio album from 1977), Abba (1992), Michael Jackson (2005), Elton John (2017) and Eminem (2005). A quarter of the UK’s Top 40 albums were originally released over a decade ago. Are our music tastes becoming increasingly nostalgic? The number of people who turned out to see Rod Stewart playing the legends slot at Glastonbury certainly suggests that. But there’s also another possibility: music streaming is causing the charts to spiral backwards into the past.

Fair enough, but as noted in the piece here on the CLR on the article – all this assumes that the charts are some sort of organic and objective means of measuring popularity and detached from corporate and commercial interests – and as we know that’s never been the case, and never less so than today. Moreover, all this is to invest charts with much greater power than they actually have. They’re far from the only indicator of the value of music or what is being listened to. I’d suggest that live shows might be as good in some respects. Anyhow, not to get on the particular columnist’s case, but somewhat entertainingly this last week they had almost the opposite argument. Not quite, but getting there.

For, they wrote:

When David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, such was the scale of media coverage and public mourning that one would have presumed his music would be everywhere for ever, elevated as he was, to misquote Smash Hits, to the position of the People’s Dame. It was briefly – Starman reached No 18, and Space Oddity No 24 – but then it wasn’t.

Each year, Forbes compiles a posthumous celebrity rich list. Bowie appeared in 2016, ranked at No 11 with estimated earnings of $10.5m (£7.8m), and again in 2017, in the same position but with earnings of $9.5m (£7m). This was unsurprising given the enormous spike in interest there is in the immediate aftermath of a superstar’s death. Yet he didn’t appear in the Forbes list again until 2022, when he was at No 3 with earnings of $250m (£195m) – the highest-ranked musician that year – but that was almost all attributable to the sale of his music publishing rights to Warner Chappell.

Unlike Prince, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Bob Marley or Michael Jackson, Bowie has not become a Forbes fixture. And with publishing now removed from his earnings tally, he is unlikely to reappear in that list unless the estate sells the master recordings from 1968 onwards that it owns and currently licenses to Warner Music Group.

This is a bit confusing in the sense that Bowie would surely be indicative of a musical nostalgia. It doesn’t matter that I and the author think he was extremely important or treasure his work, particularly in the 1970s, or whether we think it worthy of transmission into the future. Nostalgia is nostalgia whether it’s based on what is subjectively considered good or bad. And one caveat to his original argument – Oasis, Fleetwood Mac, Abba, Elton John and Eminem are either still playing, or only recently stopped. It’s not that surprising they’d have a currency this last year.

What’s strikingly at odds with the original piece is the following:

Financial success is one measurement of posthumous success and importance. Streaming is another, where Bowie also underperforms for an artist of his stature. He currently has 22 million monthly listeners on Spotify compared with Bob Marley’s 26m, Whitney Houston’s 34m, Elvis Presley’s 45m and John Lennon’s 43m. Only one Bowie track makes it into Spotify’s “Billions Club”: Under Pressure, with more than 2bn plays. But that is presumably driven by Queen’s involvement, especially given they have a further seven tracks with more than a billion streams each.

Again, is this the yardstick we are meant to use? And what does it mean? Surely part of this is the commerciality of the music, it’s spread throughout the culture, and so on. Bowie was huge, but I’d hazard that he was always to one side of some of those named above I suspect even at his peak (surely Presley was much more popular, Lennon too, Houston too, though she had a shorter career, Marley? Indeed oddly, the author argues that it is the lack of new compilations that is hobbling Bowie’s fame and preventing him being picked up by younger audiences.

This too is curious:

The use of “Heroes” in the finale of Netflix’s Stranger Things last week was clearly hoped to vivify the track. It charted at No 34; by comparison, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill immediately went Top 10 after being used in the series in 2022. It also has only had 38k uses in TikTok videos to date – not exactly viral numbers.

Was it simply a commercial decision or was there perhaps an appreciation that the song fitted the finale both in terms of its relative recency in being released within the previous decade of the time period of the show and its content? And even if it didn’t hit with the same vigour as Kate Bush, well, people’s tastes are different. I think it’s a better song, marginally, but many will disagree and that’s reasonable.

Again, a more fundamental question is what is a musical legacy? It’s always slightly odd, for me at least, to see how high profile the music of my teens and twenties remains in the culture. Not all of it, not most of it, not by a long shot, but enough that going into a shop or wherever I’m as likely to hear songs that were popular forty, fifty and sixty and even seventy years ago as something from now. I don’t think it inevitably that that will remain the case, as generations fade away I’d imagine that that will change too. Whatever survives into the future will survive – as with most music before it, due to commercial, cultural and other pressures. I think it’s impossible to predict what will still be listened to a hundred years from now. It’s entirely possible that musical tastes might change completely, as they have time and again in the past. And that, that’s okay.

Been on a motorik/kosmische listen this last month or so. Possibly because a computer I used crashed and had to transfer everything, files, music, the lot to another from back ups, and what did I see in the process, but Neu! and hadn’t listened to them in a while and one thing leading to another had me following Rother and co. down a rabbit hole. I’ve always loved motorik. Probably first heard it with Bowie’s Heroes in the 1970s long before I really got into or got music, though some suggest that the Beatles Tomorrow Never Knows, another genuinely great piece, was a rough precursor with its insistent but hazy groove. I’ve edged around the kosmische sound ever after. Initially listening to songs like L.A. by The Fall, and then getting to grips with the original groups.

Neu! probably remain my favourite, not least because they arguably perfected the motorik drum beat – but that’s not to ignore the other groups who are included under the broad umbrella, some of whom sounded very different indeed. For example, there were evidently a lot of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart fans in Germany back in the day, that’s for sure. I’ve never been much of one myself, but credit where credit is due. They were a strong influence, though only in so far they nudged an untapped creativity to develop and flourish. And similarly with Floyd, The Velvet Underground and others. Nor, for all the talk of this being a music that removed the blues – something that’s probably overstated – was this unrelated to the rest of the world. Jazz was a significant influence, classical avant-garde similarly, and Michael Rother of Neu! speaks of how the music of India and Pakistan inflected his own styles.

Still, isn’t it fascinating that Germany (or a part of Germany given this was well before it was reunited) was able to develop a genuinely innovative and distinct musical scene entirely of its own. It’s not that there weren’t similar groups elsewhere, but there was a sensibility entirely of Germany in relation to kosmische.

Neu! has been covered in this slot previously. CAN likewise. Others too who followed on in that tradition (though interestingly not Kraftwerk yet – post in the works for them, and Cluster too). And Neu! contained multitudes. Here’s a quote from the piece on this site:

Slabs of abstraction near poppy excursions, and an energy and a clarity that oddly seemed to foreshadow punk, albeit it sounded nothing like punk. And post-punk, yes, most definitely. Negativland sounds uncannily like Joy Division. No strike that, it sounds exactly like Joy Division. Overall the guitars are subdued, sounding more like keyboards at times. And the balance on the album is weighted I’d say more to soundscapes than anything else.

There you go.

Which naturally leads to Harmonia. A super-group of sorts, though kosmiche’s history is one littered with members of one group winding up in another confusing matters and perhaps suggesting that from the off there were strongly shared sensibilities even where the music sounded radically different. Whatever the boundaries of the area, and they were widely drawn, the family linkages are very real even if the groups went in many different directions.

Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius of Cluster joined Neu!’s Michael Rother in Harmonia. Neu! was not quite in abeyance, but as a project it was fading. Across three years, 1973 to 1976 they released two albums, and then reformed for a couple of years in the late 2000s (Meanwhile Rother’s former partner in Neu!, Klaus Dinger formed La Düsseldorf, but that’s a different post entirely).

Cluster, though a much more improvisational operation than Neu! themselves had hinted at some approaches not unlike the other group – Zuckerzeit is a remarkable album too. Yet what emerged from their collaboration with Rother was something else. Eno argued that Harmonia were ‘the world’s most important rock group’. Perhaps so, they were certainly well ahead of of their time while being perfectly of it.

I find it difficult to describe the music here. The closest I can come is to suggest that the first album, Musik von Harmonia, is a combination of both Cluster and Neu!’s strengths while being distinctly different to both. It takes the clarity of the latter and the grit of the former and blends them together. It’s not abrasive but it’s not the smoothness of Neu!

The second, Deluxe, is perhaps more restrained, but only marginally so. Walky-Talky brings Guru Guru’s Mani Nemueier on board for some of the time to great effect. Granted it’s a largely a softer set of tracks, and there’s fewer of them with perhaps less range, but it’s never boring.

I also find it difficult to quite separate the two albums which is odd because both are distinctively different, which is perhaps also to say that I find both near perfect in different ways. There’s an emotional response to this which is quite strange. Hearing Neu! For the first time was like hearing Black Dog, Aphex Twin or anything from Warp records – a sense of listening to something that I hadn’t realised I missed until I heard it.  It’s of the 1970s. One can hear that in the arrangements. And yet, this could have been written and performed yesterday. The instrumentation, compositions and structure are timeless. Perhaps it is that there is a genuine warmth (and humour) to the music and a humanity too.

How many people listened to this at the time is a fair question. Eno clearly did, eventually working on tracks with the other three on an album that was only released decades later – which I’ve never heard, curious as to what people make of it. Bowie did too -he must have really liked Monza (Rauf und runter). And the fingerprints of Harmonia, and Cluster and Neu! are all over a range of later groups and musicians. Ambient, dance, IDM, downtempo, sure, all owe debts to this and kosmische more broadly, but these albums shine in their own right and their own way.

Watussi

Sehr kosmisch

Dino

Veterano

Hausmusik

Deluxe (Immer weiter)

Walky Talky

Monza (Rauf und runter)

Notre Dame

Gollum

Well, that was a quick contest. Perhaps because no-one, bar one candidate, was that pushed to engage in it?

The next leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) will be the former senior police officer Jon Burrows. 

Mr Burrows, who represents North Antrim in the Northern Assembly, was the only candidate to put his name forward for the leadership by the close of nominations at 5pm on Thursday. 

In a statement, the party confirmed Mr Burrows had “successfully met the nomination threshold of 35 signatures from at least nine constituency associations” and would stand as a candidate for UUP leader. 

Meanwhile this is an interesting take on it.

Anyone on here closer to the ground know anything about Burrows?