My understanding is that the old gaelic bardic tradition had died out by around 1800. Remaining Irish-speakers were not very literate. O Nuallain often satirised - or took mighty flailing swipes at - attempts to anglicize them with a little education. See <The Poor Mouth/ An Beal Bocht>, par exemple.

And then from 1900 starry-eyed idealists began writing in Irish again, and wound up with a state where 99% of the people spoke English and associated Irish with the bad old days. Yet governments made Irish classes compulsory in schools, adding resentment to the mix.

Of course, we tended to the profane, scatological, etc in our translations. One day we had a substitute teacher in a Literature class who had nothing prepared for us. She suggested we simply read whatever the assigned book was.

What? Did I say that out loud? It was, uh, my thoughts overloading. I meant, your majesty is like a stream of babelfish sperm. Oh god, no. Will I never escape this self-imposed pit of vice and profanity?

Oh, and second-best apologies because I reserve my deepest apologies for when people are trying to kill me. Which will probably happen soon.

<L’Europe des patries souveraines, laminées par une interdépendence économique et une harmonisation croissante des législations, est en train de s’effacer.> (P.Bruckner, La Mélancolie Démocratique)

I've decided not to sleep until I pass <acirce> and I've stepped up operations on the <argument page>.

I went back there to see if any of my posts had been erased, and made the mistake of reading the ensuing three pages.

I was so flabbergasted I have started a new plan, although it could get me counting backwards.

Yes I believe they do speak French there.

But Shirley, there must have been some other language they spoke prior to that...

German?

Also, I must talk to you sometime about the great GM ELO engine comparison project. I did something like a small version of it once, badly.

Why not now? :)

If the engine failed to pick the GM move, I looked for its 2nd, 3rd and 4th choices. If the move was in, say, 20th place, it was usually easy to say whether it was a GM error or a strong move that was too deep for the computer.

If you have time/inclination, would you consider giving me/us some critical feedback on this <Andrew Sweeny> video?

His new record just got picked up by a European Label so he is pretty happy right now.

Largely, one supposes, because a few "proper videos" of his songs will now be made by people who actually know what they're doing, and actually own cameras and such.

Anyways, here it is- this one's about <ritual human sacrifice>, a topic dear to Andrew's heart, and mine, for some reason...

"The Child is Watching a Scar on the Moon"

Here are two other videos I like. The first, by Talking Heads, is from the golden age of music video in the late 80s. By then the medium was attracting star directors and advertising-level budgets. 'And She Was' is different, though: it has a quirky homemade feel, despite its visual sophistication. It's always hard to remember exactly when a particular special effect went from impossible to absurdly expensive to routine ... but this looks like the kind of stop-motion animation Terry Gilliam used on Monty Python 20 years earlier, with some newer tricks thrown in, like David Byrne popping up on b/w TV screens. Still nothing fancy, but a great rushing swirl of objects -- which, most of the time, actually fit the song lyrics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZAy...

The second one is a Joni Mitchell song. Not an official video: a montage of stills in a style something like yours. It works well, but it has an all-time classic song holding it up. Which helps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpFu...

And now: The Child is Watching a Scar on the Moon. You have a real talent for finding images: some are so perfect it hurts. The danger is of being too literal: one doesn't want to have an illustrated version of the song.

But you found some amazing moons. That pic of the moon sitting in the ocean could be straight out of Cohen: "They'll never reach the moon/ at least, not the one that they're after/ it's floating broken on the open sea/ and it carries no survivors".

I also think that *you* might be one of the children in the video.

I like the film stills from Babylon, too.

Something to watch out for is the slide from colour to b/w and back. As I said, your other video inverted the usual practice, starting in b/w and going to colour for the 'insert' - the historical or dream sequence. Here, it seems, I dunno, more random.

Sterling academic sentence that, eh? "It seems, I dunno, more random". I remember about 30 years ago a posh literary type sneering at my habit of using demotic language to talk about the arts. But he was a fossil and I wasn't.

I had a theory about the "lost postmodern stage" of black-and-white and silent film. They became technologically obsolete so quickly they never got to explore their trans-avant-garde potential, apart from a few dadaist films, the early Bunuel works, and later oddities like Eraserhead. <mack> wants me to turn this into a real thesis, but the outline is as far as I've got. I'm lazy.

It's 6am here now. I got up at five to play with the world.

Andrew's lyrics are mostly concrete, and illustrative pics suit them. (How would one 'illustrate' a Dylan line like 'the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face'?) You could trawl the archives forever, or you could have a flash of lateral inspiration.

Maybe ... *maybe* ... you're a little too much in thrall to the songs, to Andrew's words. Trying to find the right image to express them. Certain video directors from that so-called golden age went to the other extreme, drenching the unfortunate song in <Eau d'Ego>. But you could try being indirect while staying true to the mood of the song, and the feeling it gives you.

I may say more if it occurs to me, OK?

I had a bunch of spider photos collected but I just threw them out in a fit.

So I decided to just go into a trance and let my feelings from the music pick the images for me in my mind.

So I couldn't stop thinking about Dario Argento while listening to this one so that's what I decided to go with-

Here it is I just finished and nobody has watched it yet-

<Jess>' nomination and <Dom>'s first actual vote, right out of the blocks, really got the ball rolling, and following some promotional activities (heh), I am now walking with a fresh new "spring in my step" - which in effect means that I went to my storage room and picked out "The Ultra Flex Pro", one of my most trusted prostheses.