STEVE EARLE at the GLASGOW CARLING ACADEMY

After many years of acoustic performances Steve Earle returns with his full rock backing band.

It was refreshing to hear his old time hits the way they are supposed to sound.

Here is a good quality footage of his current tour ( The song "someday" starts at the 2min 30 sec mark:



His ubiquitous high profile political comment of the concert concerned immigration , "Immigration is Americas past ; present and ,if it has one, the Future."

Here is a good example of the tight sound the band has from footage taken at the concert:



For the second night in a row , the other being James , the Barrowlands got a glowing mention.
Steve related when he gets together with many musicians to do session work or jam the topic of Glasgow being an extra special place for concerts always comes up.The proof this is not just patronising talk is in the pudding as they say , and this being Steve third visit to Glasgow in little over two years is ample proof of that.

Here is a recording of the song Copperhead Road from the tour:

JAMES at THE ROYAL GLASGOW CONCERT HALL

A night of re-remembered favourites was how the Band advertised the evening , forewarning not to expect too many hits in the setlist.They will be coming in December if you want the classic rabble rousing roadshow.

James were accompanied by An Orchestra and Choir lending weight to the reworked songs.The good thing about the Show was the band had full instruments for the rock show , the Orchestral arrangements were genuine enhancers to the stock musicality of the band itself.

The video below gives a good example of the Orchestra giving depth , weight and added dimension to the bands material:




"This is a long way from the Barrowlands" was the statement the lead singer made , but this version of one song i did recognise certainly brought the Barrowlands back to the Royal Concert Hall.

ZAINAB AND ZOHAS DAY OF FUN

An action packed day of Fun...involving Nature ; rioting and riotous assembly.( click on the images for full size pics).



Zainab does not give a duck about pondlife....




Zainab does her bit to contribute to the UK riots....alas it did not catch on in Scotland ( due to the inclement weather).




Band of Brotheresses , a Full Dress rehearsal minus the warpaint and creme eggs ,getting ready for an evening of Adult annoying and driving Parents up the Walls ( a.k.a. Halloween night).

MARGARET CHO at the STAND

Margaret Cho is loud;brass;out-spoken and (very)occasionally funny.

This does highlight the very important point the differential of freedom to say what you want and being politically empowered are massive gaps in US politics.Money and privatised lobby talks , the right to free speech comes a long long second , if anything , serving as an anger dissipation tool.Hence why things such as facebook are seen as revolutionary instruments in places like the Arab World , but in the West are get-off-your-chest whinger distractions which cover impotent stunts against the real power sources in the West.

Margaret has talent to be a real cutting advocate , but tonight she crossed the line from entertaining educator that makes the audience laugh and think deeply to brazen vanity queen exhibitionist and kept going.

She could do with taking up Nancy Frasers challenge to make minority rights into a mass poverty issue , rather than a self-defeating labelling and cultural issue which is blocking progress on many fronts from Feminism to Child Poverty which can only be addressed by taking all these challenges to the economic forum.

Here is Margaret discussing issues of Race:

SNOOP DOGG at the GLASGOW CARLING ACADEMY

In these days of cataclysmic economic crisis requiring new and innovative solutions for new and innovative problems David Cameron has come up with something bordering on genius , despite the sanitised name and spin giving the Chimera of depth and substance to the policy, he has come up with what amounts to a Shop-A-Darkey Scheme.Darkeys will be required to prove they are not illegal , and the Police will be required to following up any tip-offs that there is a Darkey in the neighbourhood.Its Political incorrectness gone mad.

A long time back i went to a Michael Jackson concert at Glasgow Green , i would never have normally gone but i was babysitting for my Nephew , accompanying him as a grown up chaperon.

Im glad i went as it was one of the finest shows you ever will see.The most striking remarkable experience was , despite his gyrating dance moves and incredible gymnastics , his voice was pitch perfect.I always felt if he had no visual frills to his show he would be rightly famous for being one of the finest singers of all time.

So nearly two decades later the very same nephew had a spare ticket for Snoop Dogg , an opportunity well worth experiencing even though im not a rap fan , except for Krazy by Tupac Shakur which drives me crazy.

I really liked the second support act , thundering bass and quality guitars.

Snoop finally came on , deliberately so late that he could only perform a 60 minute set before the curfew set in whether the crowd wanted encores or not."Shafted" is the word my nephew used.

After spending the first 5 minutes or so establishing that his motherfuckin name is indeed Snoop Dogg , he spent many more what his motherfuckin game is , apparently he claims to be a big hit with the ladies , though the only ladies on stage were being paid for the privilege.He also had a motherfuckin dog , like hoopy the hound (the Celtic Mascot), doing odd things with his tail.A motherfuckin fat guy would appear once in a while to give depth to the chorus segments.A brilliant PA gave out a great sound to the spare set.

Videos of his concert on youtube are not of the quality to do him justice , this is the best i could find:



Dont get me wrong , this was a great concert , just not enough pride to put on a show that was in the moment as it were.A small criticism on a great night.

THE RAGGED TROUSERED PHILANTHROPISTS at the CITIZENS

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the passing away of Robert Noonan ( familiar to us as Robert Tressell).He died in the workhouse hospital and was buried in an unmarked paupers grave.

This year also sees a stage version of his book ( published after he was long dead) by a very talented duo playing the various characters of this classic iconic tale.

You can get a preview of the production in the video below:


Alas Noonan does have flaws representative of the UK left which it has failed to shake off , hence the reason , along with other left movements in the West and Continental Europe , the left have failed to be an effective counter-balance to the Right.

Noonan joined up with the Boers in South Africa to fight the British , the oddity of the conflict was both sides were fighting for the right to dominate the Natives and exploit the natural resources of the land for their exclusive benefit.

Noonans leadership of the Trade Union Movement brought to prominence his only high profile strike action , he led strikes to exclude Black skilled Labour taking the jobs of the Whites.

It is in this context his place as a Hero of the Working Man has to be seen , along with such other heroes as H.G.Wells ; George Bernard Shaw and others who wanted equal rights for the British Worker , but , as Edward Said has identified , had no intention of ever seeing the British Empire or the wealth generated from the Colonies put under threat , a position which reached its heights when the British Left almost universally supported the War Effort , including Noonan himself in what turned out to be WW1 on the basis that German expansion , especially Naval , would threaten British livelihoods generated from domination of the Seas and Trade Treaties resulting from imperial Empire policies.

Noonan is much to be admired for what he is , though he should not be elevated to what he was definitely not.The review of his Novel in the Guardian gives a good account of what the strength of the Book is , identifying the nature of industrial capitalism , though the article is deft to say the least on the counter-balance of the great money trick passage ("The Great Oration"), which reads more like a sales pitch for an Albanian Pyramid selling scheme than a world wide universal alternate to the unjust blight of capitalism.A White Labourers Manifesto would be a more accurate description.Unironically the play also misses out on the "solution" element of the "Great Oration" as well , though not a surprise to me at all.

The video below concerned a passage "The Great Money Trick" from his Book in which he is in his best element:


All of this does lead to a very serious point of the great fallacy of the Left in that its heroes of yester-century did have these un-universal views ( and therefore solutions) on Society and Justice.As E.L. Doctorow pointed out in his Book of Daniel an Activist is only as good as his Analysis , if the foundation rocks of the Lefts dogma are flawed , so will any projects , no matter how sincere to re-visit and re-invent Marxism be equally fundamentally flawed.

This is especially true in the preposterous romantic notions the left have based their mirages on based around 68 , as Eammon McCann has pointed out those events are best understood in the context of a global mass civil rights movement , not a cusp of a Trotskyite Revolution.The various Governments of the time were never really threatened with collapse , The British and French retained power in subsequent elections and in the US took a turn to the right.If anything the organised Left stiffled universal progress by joining up with the Right to restore block party political status quo at the expense of allowing the mass movements to grow organically.

If the Left want to leave the later 19th Century and challenge successfully in the 21st they best leave Marx in Peace and have a good look at Bolivar ( to do this they need to escape the cycle of Marx having wrote of Bolivar in disparaging terms , even though Bolivar was successful where Marx did not even get off the ground).A Good starting point for the would be to read Gabriel Garcia Marquezs "The General In His Labyrinth" and his views on Debt and External influences in developing Regional mass Movements with Universal Goals.

The Greens , with progress in Germany and our very Own Scotland show what can be done with good analysis and being a bone fide participant in a mass movement.Rather than the dismal performances of the Left and its pre-occupation of occupying and trying to control the public for their own dogmatic out of date ends.