Saturday, December 02, 2023

Vale, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues: The Ignorance Next Door, and What to Do about It

1987 was a year still Before Children (BC) and two years before the Iron Curtain was torn Down and New York sad memory of John Lennon death reached 7 years … According to another Joe: The song is an Irish folk-style ballad and was written as a duet, with the Pogues' singer MacGowan taking the role of the male character and MacColl playing the female character. It was originally released as a single on 23 November 1987 and later featured on the Pogues' 1988 album If I Should Fall from Grace with God.

I could have been someone

Well so could anyone

You took my dreams from me

When I first found you

I kept them with me babe

I put them with my own

Can't make it all alone

Vale, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, dead at 65, NYT: “I was good at writing," MacGowan said. "I can write, I can spell, I can make it flow, and when I mixed it with music, it was perfect.” Never more perfect than "Fairytale of New York."


(As for the much missed Kirsty MacColl, she already had a solid career before the song was released, providing backing vocals for the likes of Robert Plant,  The Smiths, Talking Heads - in 1990s after children, my neighbour from the second Birriga Rd - Steve Douglas did many gigs with the Talking Head roaming US in 1980s)


Rebecca Solnit: Billionaires are out of touch and much too powerful. “The 1% aren’t just the biggest climate wreckers, they also greatly influence how the world responds to the crisis.”


The Ignorance Next Door, and What to Do about It

Philosophers sometimes complain about how colleagues in other fields don’t know enough about what philosophy is and what philosophers do, even as said colleagues make pronouncements about philosophy, or decisions that affect philosophy department, or changes to curricula or requirements relevant to philosophy course offerings, and so on.

[lock and keys by Abloy]

In case you were looking for an example of this, here’s a recent one that was published at Inside Higher Ed.

In it, historian Steve Mintz (Texas) argues that universities should require their students to take ethics courses—not a bad idea at all. But he seems to think this should (or perhaps could only) be achieved by taking ethics education out of the hands of philosophy departments and having it be taught by others who have “no formal training in ethics.”


NYT Piece Calls Learning Loss “Startling” — But It’s Not


Ghostly Messages: Australia’s Lost Horror Anthology, ‘The Evil Touch’

By Andrew Nette

In a June 2017 article in Fortean Times, the British magazine concerned with strange and paranormal phenomena, writer and broadcaster Bob Fischer discussed how the sensation of not being exactly sure what you were watching on television was a common experience in relation to consuming visual culture in the 1960s and 1970s…


We Are the Mutants: The Book!

If you haven’t heard, we wrote a book! And it’s out right now! Won’t you please buy it and be our best friend?

If you haven’t heard, we wrote a book! And it’s out right now! If you’ve followed us over the last six plus years, you know our MO: we get deep down into the berserk array of popular and outsider media produced during the Cold War and talk about what these various artifacts—lost, forgotten, seemingly disposable—mean in the larger arenas of politics and culture, then and now. We Are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon takes that approach and applies it to American films released between the arrival of US combat troops in Vietnam and the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term—probably the most discussed and beloved stretch of movies in Hollywood history. 

Read more about the book at our publisher, Repeater

We talk about the book in an interview with Joe Banks at The Quietus.

Check out Andrew Nette’s review at Pulp Curry.

Have a look at Johnny Restall’s review at Diabolique.

You can buy the book pretty much anywhere books are sold, including bookshop.orgAmazon, and Penguin Random House. If you dig it, please rate it and/or review it. We need all the word of mouth we can get. Thank you and keep an eye on the site—we’ll be back soon in some (altered) way, shape or form.

The Mutants


Gen Z wants action movies, not woke storylines: UCLA study.

Gen Z would rather see movies that show two men fighting each other, rather than kissing one another, according to a new survey from the University of California Los Angeles.

The younger, college-aged generation ranked superhero movies and action films high in their interest list, along with “hopeful, uplifting content with people beating the odds” and “people with lives like my own” according to the survey.

Meanwhile, “Nonbinary and LGBTQIA+ Identities” is ranked at the bottom, according to the survey from UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers.

The survey of 1,500 people also found Gen Z is not interested in sexual content, which may explain their lack of interest in LGBT identity-focused programming.

Respondents reported that they use entertainment media “to escape and take my mind off of things.”